They happen to be the default shortcuts on a Mac, and I imagine many of you Macintosh designers are familiar with Option-G for copyright, Option-R for registered trademark, and so forth. Alright, so you have a handful of other symbols that you can access just by right clicking, choosing Insert Special Characters, followed by Symbols, and then whatever symbol it is you want, and again, you have keyboard shortcuts across both platforms. On a Mac, you still have that same old shortcut of Option-8, and just to show you that it works, I'll go ahead and type Alt+8 here on a PC, and sure enough, I end up with a bullet. Now if you want to add a bullet, you can just double click in your text in order to switch to the type tool and position your blinking insertion marker, and then you can right click anywhere inside the document window, choose Insert Special Character followed by Symbols and finally Bullet, which now has a new keyboard shortcut, at least on the PC, of Alt+8. Well, things have changed slightly in the latest version of Illustrator. On Windows if your keyboard includes a numerical keypad, you can press and hold the Alt key and then dial in 0-1-4-9 sequentially. It also enjoys an ancient keyboard shortcut of Option-8 on the Mac, and for the record, any time you're seeing an OS-level keyboard shortcut, it appears in blue. Alright, let's start our look at the special characters available inside Illustrator CC 2017 with the everyday average bullet, which has been around forever. ![]() ![]() I set the text in the font Rosario, which is currently available from Typekit in case you want to download it. Now a quick note for those of you who may feel like opening this document. Not judging me, I just didn't do it, but I figure somebody's got to cover it, and so, why don't we cover it right now. I'm not judging him, he just didn't do it, and I'm not covering it in my one-on-one courses. Now, this is a very minor feature indeed, so minor that Justin Seeley did not cover it in his new features course. ![]() And so, even though you've been able to enter a bullet forever, now we have menu commands and customizable keyboard shortcuts. Well, fast forward to the present day, and Illustrator CC 2017 has finally kind of caught up. Things like the bullet and the copyright symbol, the em dash, and so forth, and then some program came along, Ready, Set, Go! or PageMaker, and gave us fixed width spaces. Now, way back in the ancient days, Apple and Adobe conspired to give us access to specialty characters.
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