If you didn’t get my Symbols presentation and grab the heart from those slides, there’s still time! Use the heart to create a presentation to warm the cockles of your favorite CEO or board member! Though it may not be anatomically correct, it’s still considered a heart and you can crazy-go-nuts all over a design with it.

Some of the adventurous of you have already snagged it and, wanting to be cutesy wutesy (and if you’re going to be, this is the day for it) decided to do a “Make Editable” on it. I’m sure what you found was NOT what you were expecting... unless you were expecting TONS and TONS of itsy bitsy segments instead of a smooth curve. If that’s what you were expecting, then no surprises for you, astute ones!

In honor of this day, the Feast of...wait, Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d not only set you up with a NICE heart, with curvies and everything BUT tell ya how I did it so that you too can do the same thing if your heart leads you in that direction.

This recipe calls for

1 Regular Webdings font

1 Letter “Y”

1 copy of Intaglio from Purgatory Design

1 copy of svg2key

First, fire up Intaglio and select the Text Tool at the bottom of the toolbar (it even tells you that it Creates text blocks if you press the Command Key...how neat!). Next type a “Y”. Be sure that your “Y” is not “y”. Why? Because it makes a difference, you’ll c. :) Now, select the Selection Tool at the top of the tool bar and your recently created Y will be selected.

Next, pull up ye olde Text-Font-Interface-mabob by pressing command-T and choose a nice hefty size like 288 so you can see your work. Now, with your “Y” still selected, you’ll want to choose the Webdings font. The Y should transform right before your eyes to a curvaceous heart, like a regular symmetrical heart with “attitude!” Now comes the magic part that makes me smile. Again with the “glyph formerly known as Y" selected, from your menu, choose Object -> Convert -> Text to Path. Ok, so it doesn’t LOOK like much has changed,

but try choosing this lil’ tool guy.  See? Magic! It takes your font and converts it to a handy-dandy outline. And this works with ANY font, and ANY letter! That alone is a very very cool thing. Now grab your jacket, because it’s about to get cooler.

The heart of the problem is that while you can copy and paste it to Keynote or iWeb, you can’t edit the fill or the stroke once there. For us, that just won’t do! I mean just creating hearts in 15 different shades of red would be torture if you had to try a lot of shades to get it JUUST right. This is a heart that is friendly to change!

To start the change, we need to export it to SVG. With Intaglio, this is simple; you just do File -> Save As and choose SVG as your format. Save that, then use svg2key (you DID follow the instructions on that website to install, right???) to convert it to a keynote file, and you’re done! Open that file to find your heart right where you left it and not in San Francisco as you thought!

OR, you can find the one I attached to the “Have a Heart” image link above.