Illustrator - Add Second Anchor Point To Text

Question

I'm using Illustrator CC. I'm creating a bar graph style graphic and need some of the bars to intersect with either the beginning, middle or end of the text label they reach to.

In this example bar 1 goes from start of January to end of February, bar 2 goes mid-January to start of February, bar 3 goes mid-January to mid-February, and bar 4 goes start of January to start of February.

(Crudely Drawn Example)

The problem I'm having is that there only seems to be an anchor point at the beginning of the text element so I can only align things accurately to the beginning. When I go add another anchor point by selecting the text element using the Add Anchor tool and clicking where I want it I get a message saying "Please use the add anchor tool on a segment of the path".

Answer 1

A couple thoughts:

(1) Is your text in a 'textbox' or as a single line of text? Did you drag out a textarea with your text marquee tool or just click somewhere and start typing? Text will behave differently depending on how you insert it.

(2) In general, text objects are not full Illustrator objects. They don't act like shapes. For them to become full Illustrator shapes, they need to be "expanded". You can find expand options in the Edit menu. Unfortunately, once you expand a text object, you can no longer change characters. It becomes 'dumb' text, but you can manipulate it any way you want.

(3) In general, my approach to aligning objects is as follows: drag out guides onto your artboard. Center, left or right align the text within its frame, and then align the guide to the textframe, by setting the textframe as the key object (select two or more objects with Shift+Click, then click once on one of the selected objects; its border will become bolder and all objects will now align to it), and aligning the guide to the middle or right or left of the textframe. Finally, using the white arrow mouse (Direct Selector), select one of your line endpoints and drag it over to the guide. It will usually snap to the guide. Alternatively, you can also play around with the align buttons and selecting the endpoint and guide with the white mouse.

Hope that helps.