Add basic formatting to text

Understanding how to manipulate and modify text using formatting options helps elevate your design. You can use these powerful formatting techniques in Adobe Illustrator to streamline your workflow and create polished artwork.

For example, you can use Find and Replace to substitute specific text within your artwork. Paste without formatting allows you to paste any copied text into your document while maintaining its properties. 

Once you've mastered the art of basic text formatting, you can use advanced text formatting techniques to add stunning effects to your text.

Read on to learn how to use these basic formatting options to achieve your desired design outcome.

Character panel overview

You can use the Character panel in Adobe Illustrator to finely tune and customize the appearance of text in your artwork. To start formatting individual characters in your document, select Window > Type > Character.

When the Type tool is active or you've selected any text, you can use the options in the Control panel to format any characters.

Only the most commonly used options are visible in your Character panel. To show all options, choose Show Options from the Options menu.

Change the color and appearance of characters

Select characters, type objects, or type paths, and apply fills, strokes, and more effects to your text in Adobe Illustrator. The text remains editable as long as you don’t rasterize it.

Underline or strike through text

You can underline or strikethrough text to highlight specific sections within your document.

For example, underlining key points in a document can make your text stand out. Striking through text is also an effective way to indicate deleted or removed content when reviewing or editing text in a document.

Press Shift + Ctrl + U (Windows) or Shift + Command + U (macOS) to quickly underline your text.

Stylize text

You can apply styles like bold and italic to your text if the font family supports them:

• For bold, press Shift + Ctrl + B (Windows) or Shift + Command + B (macOS).
• For italic, press Shift + Ctrl + I (Windows) or Shift + Command + I (macOS).

Format case and capitalization styles

Formatting text in all caps or small caps can be a great way to enhance your text styles. You can explore the various case and capitalization options to create stylish typography in Adobe Illustrator.

Apply all caps and small caps

Change capitalization styles

You can change the capitalization style of text in your document to quickly modify your text's appearance.

Select the characters or type objects that you want to modify. Navigate to the Type menu > Change Case and choose from one of the following options:

• UPPERCASE: Convert all characters to uppercase.
• lowercase: Convert all characters to lowercase.
• Title Case: Capitalize the first letter of each word.
• Sentence case: Capitalize the first letter of each sentence.

Pro tips and tricks

• When you change the color of a type object, Adobe Illustrator overwrites the attributes of individual characters in the type object.
  
• The default weight of an Underline and Strikethrough depends on the size of the type.
  
• The default value for Small Caps is 70%.