Scaling a text box in Illustrator CS6 (without scaling text)

Ok, I have a fresh Illustrator document. Pasted some copied text into the "artboard" (the clipboard is severely broken, but that's for another day).

The textbox that gets pasted is one huge line that goes from here to Timbuktoo.

So I need to resize it to 1/3rd of the page. I presume, as happens in every other sensible tool in the world, the text would flow to the width I give the textbox. The text itself will NOT get resized.

However, this is not what happens. THe text gets scaled completely. No exceptions.

I've been googling for the last 2 hours. Nothing works.

1. Some posts say I must "show bounding borders". Doesn't help at all.


2. Other posts say some nonsense about main selection tool and direct selection tool. These tools do nothing. Both the arrow-icons, when used to drag the corners of the box, lead to the text getting resized anyway.



3. Someone suggested that when I copied and pasted text from a text file into Illustrator, this became an object, not actually text. Well, in that case, how should we paste text? Not everyone working on an Illustrator document is always and forever expected to write all the text manually, is it?

Seriously, how does this work? Any preferences I need to change? I used to work with CS4 and I recall it was much easier.

Would appreciate any inputs. Thanks!

Answer

In Illustrator, there are two ways to control your basic block of text:

1. Point Type object: Select the Type tool, click on the artboard, then press Paste.


2. Area Type object: Select the Type tool, click and drag on the artboard to create a text box, and then paste the text into there.

You've been doing number one; number two should get the behavior that you want.