keyboard shortcut for 'bold' in Illustrator CS3

[Guest]

For some reason, the typical keyboard shortcut for 'bold' text Ctrl+Shift+B seems to be assigned in Illustrator CS3 to show/hide bounding box. There doesn't appear to be a 'bold' option in the Illustrator defaults to change it. I've tried deleting the prefs file, but it's still the same. InDesign and PhotoShop are fine, but not Illustrator. I can't seem to find anything about this in the forums...can anyone help? Many thanks in advance. James.

[Steve Fairbairn]

In some cases (and only some) it's enough to enter a B in the type style box in the Character palette.

This only works if a style called "Bold" is available in the specific font that you are using.

Illy doesn't create a faux bold like some other apps. do.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

steve fairbairn wrote:

Illy doesn't create a faux bold like some other apps. do.

I do not believe that ID and Photoshop create the faux  bold or italic but will simply select the bold or italic font if it is installed otherwise it does nothing.

So as I wrote illy is out dated

[Steve Fairbairn]

Yep, that's pretty much what I was on about. You can do faux bold and italic in apps. like Word and I seem to remember that Quark used to do it too. But to my way of thinking it's bad Latin to use faux-anything. It's better to use a different font (or even create one) than to try and force a font to do what it wasn´t designed to do. I bear great respect for good type designers and get a bit puritanical when I see good fonts being misused.

Photoshop gives you different kinds of anti-aliasing which can sometimes get you part of the way you want to go.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

Actually Illustrator does this the correct way, sort of? It does not have this behavior and never has as far as I know. You have to select the bold font, th4ee italic font and , the bold italic font as well as the Roman.

Yes the other programs do this and when the font has the proper version of the italic, bold italic and bold versions of the font they properly select so that makes Illustrator out of date.

[Guest]

Thanks for this, guys. Actually, I just went back to Illustrator CS2 on my old machine, and realised it didn't do it on there, either!

I'm not quite sure why Adobe would not be consistent with InDesign, PShop, etc, because they don't substitute bold fonts with faux if they are not there...they simply don't alter anything.

Thanks again.

James

[nilsausta]

Looks like the only way to get shortcuts for bold and italic are via actions.

I needed shortcut for italic font. So I started recording an action, changed a character to italic and then stopped recording the action.

Then I added shortcut Ctrl+F7 to that action.

[janoa69051398]

actually, it saves the all text attributes, not only the bold, so it is not universal solution

[paul.c.cook]

Awesome tip.

[Josha5E3C]

In addition, to remove the other styling you can save the actionset, then open it in a text editor and remove the parameters it changes. It just applies the typeface with the bold or italics to the selection. So you'll need to record an action for every font you want to apply bold or italics to.

This parameter applies calibri-bold, the hexadecimal part under value contains the text calibri-bold as hexadecimal encoded ascii (43616c696272692d426f6c64):

/parameter-1 {
			/key 1718578804
			/showInPalette 1
			/type (ustring)
			/value [ 12
				43616c696272692d426f6c64
			]
		}

Here's what I ended up with, it uses shift+F2:

/version 3
/name [ 9
	4d79416374696f6e73
]
/isOpen 1
/actionCount 1
/action-1 {
	/name [ 4
		426f6c64
	]
	/keyIndex 18
	/colorIndex 0
	/isOpen 1
	/eventCount 1
	/event-1 {
		/useRulersIn1stQuadrant 0
		/internalName (adobe_SLOCharacterPalette)
		/localizedName [ 17
			4368617261637465722053657474696e67
		]
		/isOpen 1
		/isOn 1
		/hasDialog 0
		/parameterCount 1
		/parameter-1 {
			/key 1718578804
			/showInPalette 1
			/type (ustring)
			/value [ 12
				43616c696272692d426f6c64
			]
		}
	}
}

[victorj78833825]

in case anyone is *still* looking for this because Adobe *still* hasn't implemented anything similar, you can try the alt+eyedropper method: use the eyedropper on something with the format you want to apply, alt-drag on the text you want to apply to. just pretend your cursor is a text selector. it will take some practice, because text selection is kinda janky in AI anyway, and not having feedback when you're doing it is broken AF. but it's doable.
yes, it applies all text attributes, but it's still faster than selecting the text, going to the character panel and looking for your attribute in a list, and clicking