Could you guys recommend a particular program that will help me with text. I know photoshop is not the ideal program. Is illustrator better?

GIRLTROUBLE!!!!!
hey what's up kid?!
I don't do text but they always say to use
Illustrator.
what ya working on?
BTWI was really shocked that noone stole
your sunflower idea for the tourney--
If I were in it I woulda stole it for certain
THERE'S also a couple threads around somewhere about best fonts for
different situations.

Hey, GT..

It depends on what you want to achieve with your text...

The reason most say Illustrator is better for text than Photoshop is that, because it is a drawing program (uses vectors as opposed to bitmap), the text will stay sharp at any size. This is great if your text size is small, or if you wish to distort its shape.

However, if you are writing a novel, I would suggest you use a container program like InDesign or *ahem* QuarkXPress.

In Illustrator, you can format the text quite easily. Just remember to create a text box first, if you want to use the "space before" or alignment features. These won't work if you simply start typing using the type tool.

Cool Sage-- so if one was to try
those programs-- what file type would
be best compatible for all? like PSD,Tiff ?

Illustrator and Freehand files are usually saved as .eps files, which would then be imported into a program like Quark. If I wanted to import a photoshop document into Quark, I would have to save it as either a tiff or eps.

Usually, Quark is the final destination for these files, again depending on context... so Quark files are saved as Quark files (.qxd)

These programs do not have the flexibility for saving different formats as does PS.

(they can all be used to create pdf files, though.)