Glyphs in Adobe Illustrator tutorial How To Easily Access All Your Characters Beginner's Guide

By Andrew Buckle, Video Tutorial Creator / Designer

Updated : 2021

How to use the glyphs in Adobe Illustrator for instant access to all the designs / characters / unusal characters in a typeface

window menu in Adobe Illustrator
type category
glyphs (to see Illustrator glyphs panel)
select the font to be examined
select show such as entire font
type tool
click artboard
select one of the glyphs by double clicking

glyphs in Adobe Illustrator and how to tutorial How to use glyphs in Adobe Illustrator. The key panel is the window menu and type and glyphs.

You can see all the characters in the selected font (or any font you select from the bottom of the glyphs panel). You can also see alternates, superscripts etc depending on the font.

The glyph panel makes it super easy to access and see all the designs in a font. To use the glyph panel, you must have created some type or at least clicked on the artboard with the type tool.

You can double click the glyph to add the character to the type selection in Adobe Illustrator. You can also select type and replace the current selected characters with any glyph double clicked in the Illustrator glyphs panel.

You can change the font as well as the font style via the same panel. This tutorial shows you how to quickly use the glyphs panel to change and add characters to any type (point or area or type on a path etc)

Basics of the glyphs panel in Adobe Illustrator and accessing decorative designs etc in a font

fonts and type tool in Adobe Illustrator panel glyphs

Select type tool and apply to current artboard
Go to the glyph panel
Double click character in glyph panel
Repeat with other characters (probably a very slow way to type a letter though)

The glyph panel is a useful feature to quickly access all the characters in a font without the need for any special characters / codes / decorative designs etc. Especially great if you want to access all the designs in the Apple Color Emoji font, try accessing them easily from the keyboard. The glyphs panel makes it so much easier to get to the various flags, items of food, Chinese symbols etc

Select the type tool
type some characters
select the type.
Go to the glyph panel.
You can change the font and font style.
You can double click the glyph and that will change the current selected character or characters to the new glyph.
You can also double click the Illustrator glyphs (without something selected) and that will generate other characters in the current type selection

Glyphs panel and special features such as alternates, changing size of the glyph etc

You can show the entire font as well as alternates for the current selection and many more (depends on the font). You can also increase the size of the glyph display by clicking the zoom out and zoom in at the bottom of the glyph panel. You can also change the font for the current selected characters as well as setting the font for any subsequent characters

type tool
add some characters in the current font to point or area type or type on a path etc
select that
go to the glyph panel
change the font from the current font to a new font
change the font style if one exists

If you select something like Myriad Pro then you can show

alternates for current selection
entire font
numerators
case-sensitive forms
lining figures
stylistic alternates
superscript
slashed zero and many others

Change selected type using glyph panel

type tool in Adobe Illustrator toolbar
Create some type (point or area etc)
Select some characters
go to the glyphs panel
select the font
double click the character to replace the selected

That is a very quick and easy way of changing designs in any selected type. It makes it a whole lot easier to use the fonts / typeface sets from graphicxtras.

The graphicxtras sets all contain a PDF showing the keyboard and decorative design relationship and that can be printed out and used as a reference but it is a whole lot easier to use the glyph panel in Adobe Illustrator to access the designs and change the curret selected artwork with another unique artwork.

Add type via the glyph panel to the current type in Adobe Illustrator

click the artboard with the type tool (or create area type etc)
go to the glyphs panel in Adobe Illustrator
select the font
select the font style
double click to add a glyph / character to the type
repeat double click to add more characters etc

glyphs

Foreign type

The Illustrator glyph panel is super useful to access foreign characters as well, not the sort of characters that you can generally type from a standard keyboard