The Ultimate Meditation Hack

A lot of us meditators feel like we can’t get our feet off the ground when it comes to our meditative practice. Typically it goes something like this:

  • Meditate thirty minutes per day
  • For seven days
  • Then, never meditate again for six months
  • Finally, the beginning and try again

Actually, that is fine because practice is practice. There is an easier way though that I call the ultimate meditation hack.

Continue reading “The Ultimate Meditation Hack”

Chapter 88. Converting Type To Outlines 6:28

  • When you convert text to outline you lose control of it as a font but gain more features
  • Envelope Distort
    • V
    • Select Text
    • Option-Shift-Command-W
    • Preview On
  • Now that you converted the text to an outline and modified it with envelope distort you can’t modify it as text but you can modify it using the envelope distort tool itself
    • Object → Envelope Distort → Edit Contents
    • Envelope Release shows you the mask because it separates the path and the Text
    • Say you can’t print to a four color press so you select the object and Expand it. Now as press can handle it. Is this an issue for keycaps?
      • Now it is no longer text, can’t fix any of it.
  • Type → Create Outlines : Turns anything into an outline
  • You can do a lot of things on text without converting it to an outline
    • But if you are going to press you gotta convert it to outline

Chapter 87. Adding Text To A Circle 6:52

  • Doing two things
    • Put text on circle
    • How in AI do you put two different kinds of text going in two directions on the same physical path?
  • One way is to use two circle, simple
  • Split the circle, add text, center it, click on the handle and center it for real
  • Pull up on the handle to put the text on the opposite side of the path
  • Great demo of baseline shifting

Chapter 86. Text And The Eyedropper Tool 5:18

  • When an Object is selected and you click something with the Eye Dropper tool you will change the strong of the selected object
  • Many tools show their options you double click them
    • You can configure it to copy or not and apply or not both Character Style and Paragraph Style
  • Command turns the pointer into Selection Tool so you can use it to select stuff and then release it to return to the selected tool. This is helpful for using the Eye Dropper tool.
  • Option-Eye-Dropper change’s it’s behavior
    • No-Option-Eye-Dropper is PULL IN from object
    • Option-Eye-Dropper is PUSH OUT to object
      • In other words you don’t have to select something to perform that modification
      • T-Over-Eyedropper
        • Can reproduce this with text

Chapter 84. Creating Character And Paragraph Styles 7:42

  • DRY
  • Perhaps
    • Can I automate the insertion of all the character pretty close to where they should be on their own layers
    • Apply a character style to everything on that layers Have all of the work done automatically?
  • Create a paragraph style based on the formatting that you performed on a paragraph
    • Same for characters
    • Extracting types from selected text
    • Develop styles that mean something to you
  • Do I configure text via style or via the entire layer?
    • Put in KQS
  • Can Load (Import) Character styles from another document
    • Perhaps create a document just to store all of those Styles for use by other files?
  • Can change styles globally
    • As you would expect

Chapter 83. The Character And Paragraph Panels 9:02

  • Always show options
    • Access in a panel the more thing and you see everything
    • Do this for all Typography stuff
  • Suitcase lets you only show fonts that you are working with per app
    • Helpful because in my keycaps I only use a few
    • $120USD
    • RightFont seems to do the same thing for $50USD
    • Emailed both to see if they have the right tool for what I want
  • What style should I use for the keycaps?
    • Is Bold easier to read?
  • Leading is the amount of the space between lines of text
  • New reading size for fonts is 11
  • Kearning is the space between individual letters V/A<-
  • Tracking is the spae between whole words <-VA->
  • T: Vertical scale
  • T: Horizontal scale
  • Baseline shift: raise up the word higher or lower
    • Super and subscript?
    • There is a setting for that
  • Rotate character
    • Thinking of rotating the Ekeman faces
    • Thinking of rotating the Emacs meta keys to make them clearly something new
  • Small bold and everything
  • Paragraph settings
    • Just have to be in the paragraph to change its attributes
  • Styles let you automate all of the customization that you made in one paragraph so you can do the same thing to another

Chapter 81. Creating Custom Type Containers 7:14

  • Type Tool vs Area Text Tool
    • Former is always rectangle or square
    • Latter lets you convert an area into a writable area
  • Option-Actions operates from center, keep forgetting
  • When you convert a Path to be a Area Text Tool it becomes invisible because it is just a place to hold Text
  • Shift-Click selects multiple objects
  • Align is always relative to something
  • Shape Builder Tool
    • Select multiple objects
    • Click this tool
    • Draw a line through objects that you want to join
  • Paste In Place
  • Demo simple way to put text into a shape by using a copy of the shape

Chapter 80. Container And Point Type 11:10

  • Text
    • Ain’t boring
    • Can do anything to Text
  • Use the Typography workspace
  • AI falls into the category of Typesetter
    • Like LaTeX?
  • Use InDesign (ID) for writing
  • Point text ignores the right margin
    • You gotta hit Enter to get a new line
  • If a Text object has focus and you want to insert text somewhere else
    • Command-Click then release and the cursor changes to a box so you can insert a Text
  • Drag a giant Text area
    • Soft-returns happen automatically in here
    • This is Container Text
  • Twist Text
    • Container; text remains vertical and fills bounds
    • Point: text rotates
  • Ditto for resizing box
  • Double-click the bar-thing to switch between Point and Container text