Illustrator - make text wrap instead of scale

Question

I have a chunk of text I need to paste into Illustrator. No matter what I do, I can't resize the text area without scaling the text. I want to resize the area and have the text wrap (font size to remain the same).

How can I do this? I'm using CS5.1

Answer 1

Select your Type tool. Instead of clicking on your canvas, click and drag to draw a box. Put whatever copy you want inside the type box and when you resize the box it will reflow the text instead of changing the font.

You can also link multiple type boxes together to flow text across multiple points on your artboard. Create type objects wherever you want text to be. Add all your copy to the first box. Assuming it overflows, there will be a symbol in the bottom-right corner of the type box. Click this symbol and then click the next type box where you want text to flow. Illustrator will flow text through as many type boxes as you link together.

Answer 2

Here's a great article, "Make Illustrator behave!" that explains it all in in full.

Figuring out under what circumstances Illustrator scales the many types of text object and when it scales the bounding box, wrapping the text, is a common frustration.

The differences between the different types of text object in Illustrator are brilliant once you've mastered and made sense of them, but massively frustrating until you do so...

I really recommend taking some time out to go through that article in full.