break apart in illustrator?

For latest Adobe Illustrator as of June 2019

1. Got to selection tool (v)

2. Click the text you are looking to separate into letter

3. Click the dropdown menu for "type"

4. Click create outlines

5. Voila! You have now separated your word into individual selectable letters in a group

(murat)  wrote Is there any option in illustrator like corel's "break apart" to seperate a text into words or letters? How can we do it in illustrator?

Although this thread is almost ten years old, I am going to answer "no" after reading how "Break Apart" works in CorelDRAW.

This is copied from a thread on the CorelDRAW community. Also, please note that CorelDRAW is the correct spelling of the software.

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Break Apart (Ctrl+K) works like this with text:

First time it breaks paragraphs apart (Paragraph text only).
Next time it breaks lines apart.
Again, and words will be sepearated,
and finally it breaks into separate characters.

Note that you can only select one text object and use Ctrl+K, so if you want to break up several separated lines to words, you have to do it one by one.

If you just want to get rid of a single character in a text I suggest you use the text tool and delete that character instead. Create a copy first and then delete all the other characters from that copy, if you want to keep it all but have one single character separated without breaking up the rest.

Problem with break apart letters and lines - CorelDRAW X4 - CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 - CorelDRAW Community

Flash has a break apart function as well.

Im with team " Create outlines, Ungroup "

What a feature, Corel Draw Introduced this feature thousands of years ago, but we are unable to get this illustrator in CC2018.

So Which One is Industry Standard Software?. There are lots of features that are unavailable in Illustrator

R&D Team Please Take into the consideration.

Match All the features that Corel Has But Illustrator Dont Have

Give User more freedom. Thanks

Select the text using "Selection Tool" and then "Right click" on the text then select the option "Create Outlines". This will break the the text in to individual Alphabets and outline them. Then Select the alphabet using the "Direct Selection Tool" by clicking the desired alphabet in the middle to select the whole and made modification as per your requirements!

Cheers!

Hey I came across this when searching for the answer myself.  I copied the list of text (which, in my case, had each word on its own line) and I copied it into Microsoft Excel.  Then I pasted into Illustrator normally and each word was it's own piece of text.  The only thing I had to do was remove the lines outside the words, using the "group" selection tool with the "+" by the arrow.  No plugin or script necessary.

Best way-

1. select the type with your selector tool
2. click on TYPE at the top of your screen
3. click create outline

that will turn the entire thing into a factor shape that you can now adjust with your pen tool or what ever.

The Acrobat plug-in Pitstop can do this. Open your AI file in Acrobat and use Pitstop to split your text into words or characters. When you re-open your file in AI you will get the message "This document has been modified outside Adobe Illustrator: Discard changes..., or Keep changes, reducing Illustrator editing capabilities" Select keep changes, If you have a simple text file, this method works well, I would use caution with more complex files. Also, Pitstop is expensive.

wow I've never seen such a list of overly complicated wrong answers to a really simple question. this thread is really old but if anyone goes searching for the answer to this like I did (I've done it before and just couldn't remember since I dont use it often).  I'm working on CS3 so idk if it works for all versions but,

1.  Select the text you want to break apart and add vertexes to.

2.  Right click on that text and from the dropdown

3.  Select  ' Create Outlines'

4.  Selec the object again

5.  From the Object menu hit ungroup

Viola, you can now manipulate your text however you like to your little heart desires.

Cheers

on the tools panel, beneath the main selection tool click on the direct selection tool and (if you hold the mouse down and the drop list of tools show) select the group selection tool. and then select the letter that you want to move and drag it or transform it or whatever. hope this helps.