Help with type

[Angelfeather]

Hi, I am very new to CS4 and am taking an on line course, so if you answer please remember I am a newbie. I am working on a project and would like to know how to create a type effect - I will try my best to describe what I want to do. Say you had a white artboard with a huge letter R on it in black and you were adding other text in black acorss it, when you go over the R some of the type won't be visible i know if the entire word is within the black R you can just change the color of that word to white but what if a letter is split - part in the black and part in the white - here is the question - how do I go about splitting those letters that straddle both colors so that the section of type in the black shows up white and the section in the white shows up black?

[Lukas Engqvist]

One way would be to connvert all the text to paths. This is acheived by "text:create outlines" or "expand". Once the text is paths you can use pathfinder to make objects of intersecting areas and then fill as you like… or select all the text and turn it into a Livepaint (see your help, and I think there is a good vid on live paint via the help file) where you can fill the logical shapes with colors as you like.

Hope that helps… I know illustrator is a little steep learning curve as you start.
You may want to try the live paint with simple shapes, start with a square and a circle overlapping first… then move to text expanded to outlines(paths).

Another way would be playing with blending modes of the top object.

[Angelfeather]

Thank you for the help, I will give this a try!