- [Narrator] Occasionally, you might want
to add a swash character for added flair.
I'll press command or control T
to bring up my character panel.
And then to the open type panel, select my type.
And this icon here will turn on my swash characters.
There aren't that many typefaces
that come with swash characters.
So if we want to create our own,
we can borrow the swash from a typeface that does
and that's what I want to do here.
I want to cut the swash from this piece of type,
which is in Adobe Caslon Pro Italic,
and apply it to this piece of type,
which is in Minion Pro.
To start with, I will select both pieces of type,
right click create outlines.
Now I'll draw myself a line
at the top of that stem of the R.
Select the character along with that line.
And then on my path finder panel, come and click
on the three dots to see more options or window path finder.
It's this option here, divide, that I want.
That's now divided the character into two separate pieces.
They are still grouped, so I will un-group them.
And I can now, with my direct selection tool,
come and select that swash and tear it off.
I'm going to come and change its color.
I'm also going to temporarily reduce its opacity
and that's so that when I move it
in position over my existing letter,
I can see how the two line up.
So now I'll need to do some rotation
and some positioning, and potentially some resizing as well.
So I'm zooming in and working
on those individual anchor points,
just adjusting the size as necessary.
When I'm happy with how that looks,
I'll swipe over everything, come to my shape builder tool
and we'll set the foreground color to black.
And I can now combine those two shapes together,
hold down my option or alt key
and subtract that piece that we don't need.
Now, there may be some cleanup that is necessary.
You may end up with more anchor points than you need
and we'll need to delete them, either with the pen tool
or by coming to object path and choosing simplify.
You can also use the smoothing tool to smooth out any bumps.