Type Tool not working

[evolvingvisions]

My illustrator 10 program suddenly stopped working on me the other day. If I try to view anything with text, I must zoom all the way in before being able to view it. Does anyone know how I can fix the problem or what has happened. I even uninstalled and reinstalled and the same thing continued to happen. I would appreciate any help that can be given. Thanks.

Jenn

 

[Eggles]

I wonder if you have too many fonts installed?

Mac or PC? Which OS? How many active fonts? Any font management software?

 

[evolvingvisions]

i don't think it is a font problem. i don't tend to add fonts to my computer very often. i do have ATM, but i don't use it. i'm on the pc and i have 240 fonts according to my font folder

 

[blueark]

When you say you have to zoom in, what do you see if you don't? I mean, is it just blank, or do you see a gray box? It's probably a long shot, but it may be that greeking is set to a larger size than you need. If that is the case, go to Preferences > Type & Auto Tracing and change Greeking to a smaller value.

 

[Eggles]

Well with only 240 fonts installed, I don't think font overload is the problem either. Try as blueark suggested and see if the greeking value is set too high.

 

[evolvingvisions]

OK. That was it....the greeking thing. Thank you very much. Can I just ask one question, what is greeking?

 

[blueark]

Greeked text, as you've noticed, replaces text under a certain size with something else, usually a gray box. It's a performance issue.

The idea is that most people zoom out just to get an overall impression of the page rather than to read through small blocks of text. Greeking allows you to see where the text is without having to wait for Illustrator to draw the individual charactors. Obviously, it's much quicker to draw a gray box than render text accurately.

 

[evolvingvisions]

Thank you very much.