Reversing the stacking order of live text in Illustrator

Question

I'm working on a graphic where I want to overlap the type. I created a text box, typed out a big old heavy font. Alternated Letter colors, put a stroke on the whole thing then pulled in the kerning like crazy. It is overlapping, but my question is can I switch the overlap order so instead of the first letter being in the back it is in the front? I know that this is possible when you are using the blend tool but wanted to know if anyone knew how to do this using live text.

I know that I can outline it and do this manually, but I wanted to see if I could do it with live text.

Answer 1

Sure, it's possible with a bit of trickery...

Set the Character Rotation of the text to 180 degrees (so each character is upside-down)...

Then rotate the whole text object 180 degrees to correct the character orientation (this will switch the stacking order in the process)...

Of course your text is now written backwards so you'll need to retype it backwards (the following image actually says "PALREVO"), but it's still live type.

(...All of that said, this is just an awkward hack and there's no real way to control the stacking order of type in a single text object. It'd probably be easier to just outline your type or use separate text objects.)

Answer 2

To use live type, you would need each glyph to be a separate type object. (In which case, you may as well create outlines.)

You can't control the "stacking" in one single live type string.