Keyboard shortcut for all caps?

[BillSiever]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to Illustrator and am making maps with tons of small caps text, and I can't find a way to apply a keyboard shortcut for them. I know how to apply keyboard shortcuts for Title Case, ALL CAPS, Sentence case, etc., but I don't see anything for small caps. I read somewhere online that "Command+Shift+H" is the shortcut for small caps on a Mac (I use a PC, so I tried Alt-Shift+H), but that didn't work. Any other ideas?

On a related note, I often find that when I use the Type on a Path tool and then try to edit the text later (to apply small caps, for instance), I can't select the first letter. For example, in Glendale Road, it selects "lendale Road." This happens a lot. I've attached a screenshot. Any ideas for how to prevent this?

Many thanks!

Bill

[John Mensinger]

For the small caps thing, I'd make a Paragraph Style that just applies small caps.

Next time you select type on a path, try triple-clicking it to select all.

[BillSiever]

Ah, perfect! I never would have thought of triple clicking, but that does the trick. And I've created a text style for all caps. Thanks!

[John Mensinger]

You're welcome. Glad to help, Bill.

[Kurt Gold]

John, have you already found a way to just apply the small caps attribute with a Paragraph style or a Character style in case you have a mixed selection of type objects with different attributes (e.g. font type, font size, leading etc.)?

InDesign can do that pretty well, but in my experience Illustrator is still not able to do it without applying unwanted changes to the different type attributes, based on some general attributes the styles actually include (although not obvious as per the style definitions).

I think there may be a bit more versatile way using an action (which is a bit tricky to set up). I'll try to post a sample action tomorrow.

[John Mensinger]

Admittedly, my suggestion was of quick and dirty formulation, but also partially predicated upon part 2 of the question, about making the selection, from which I inferred each application of the (small caps) style would be discrete. But even so, I'd also have to admit that I rarely work with paragraphical text in Illustrator, so my experience is thin on diversity.

[Kurt Gold]

Well, I think your suggestion is very good, John.

And it works pretty well as long as the selection contains type objects with the very same attributes. But as soon as there is a mixed selection, currently the styles do not act discretely in Illustrator.

[Kurt Gold · Accepted solution]

Here you can download an action that applies small caps without changing the original text attributes:

Small Caps maker

After importing it into the Actions palette you can assign a shortcut to the action.

Note that setting up the action required some manual editing in the .aia file which cannot be done with the normal Illustrator UI.

[BillSiever]

Brilliant -- thank you very much! Works like a charm.

-- Bill