This one is long overdue.
We need to be able to scale letters in Paragraph text. Sometimes you need just that little to fit a lot of text in small space.
Squishing text shouldn't be able to be done on paragraph text in my opinion. Not even as an option.
One can convert paragraph text and change the horizontal aspect independent of the vertical. That's what it's for in my opinion...
Thank you for your interest in this matter, but it seems that nobody understood the question. As I said, this option exists in Illustrator for ages, but I want to be able to do it in my favorite environment.
You have a defined space in which you have to squeeze certain amount (to say a lot is an understatement) of text. You can use Fit Text To Frame but you'll get 2.5pt sized text. So you make it at least 3.5pt (bare minimum that can be printed in flexo), use condensed font if you have it in all languages and styles, Line spacing 80%, Before paragraph 90% or 1pt. Now you have just 10 more lines to squeeze in. So you make Character spacing -10% and Word spacing 50%. You can barely discern text from background anymore, and there are two more lines that won't fit in. Wouldn't it be nice to have an option to Scale the font by -10% and relax spacing a bit, so that we have a little of white space between letters to be able to read it? And when the customer order the labels again with modifications to text, wouldn't it be nice that some other operator can open this file and find editable Paragraph text to make the small modifications?
Below you can see some examples of labels with text that is "squished" in Illustrator. They are not my work, so you can express your abomination at me as much as you like. Almost all merchandise sold in eastern Europe is plastered with text like this in every language imaginable. If you think these are too much you should see a package of "Allways maxi pads". There is barely room for logo on these. Typography, with it's rules is a wonderful thing, but sometimes you don't have the luxury to follow the rules.
Igor Jeremijev said:They are not my work, so you can express your abomination at me as much as you like.
There is probably no need to express an opinion -- they are both clearly intended to be as illegible as possible
But I am intrigued by your two comments ...
Paragraph text already has the options to change spacing,. But if you start with a 3.5pt font and scale it down by 10%, you have a 3.2pt font. So either you would be creating something that flexo cannot print, or 3.5pt is not the bare minimum and you could have simply use 3.2pt for the paragraph.
I need separate horizontal and vertical scale. So, if I have 3,5pt size, I want to keep the height but to slim it a little.
Maybe I've been a little vague with my request.
Unless I am mistaken, you are asking for something similar to what I show in the rather extreme case below. For those unfamiliar with the tool, note how the second line is compressed to 47% of its length, while retaining the same height. And, yes, both lines are one paragraph.
The funny thing is I have never noticed the lack of this ability in CD. Perhaps because I spend so much time bouncing between software and platforms as the customer's files demand.
What I find really odd is that CD does not have this function (at least, I can't find it now that I look). Yet I am able to do this in Adobe, in Quark, heck, even in MS Word and Open Office. It really does seem to be a feature whose time is overdue.
--OB