Thinking Inside The Box

You know, I have to say that when designing a graphic or logo there seems to be a helluva lot of time spent dicking around with text adjustments. You sit and tweak on point size, leading, tracking, kerning and so on but you also want to experiment with different fonts. Well, when you pick a different font all your adjustments go out the window. If you've got a really condensed font and then try an extended one it can blow up so big you can't see the whole thing anymore. Well, what if you told the software (e.g. Illustrator, Quark etc.) no man, make everything fit within THIS BOX. I want a tool that automatically constrains any and all text that you put into a certain box no matter what to fill the bounds of the box.

If the text was made to behave then it would simply be a matter of tweaking what font you want and the size of the constraining box to fit with the other elements. If you make a certain sized box in Quark and type or import too much text you get an overflow box. Well, why not just do whatever it takes to make it fit? And you should be able to control what parameters it's allowed to change. If you don't want any distortion of the chracters it should only adjust size equally and then tweak the leading\spacing to fit. Obviously there could be a practical limit. Certainly if you make a small box and paste a whole paragraph inside it you don't want .00005 pt. type or something.

I don't know if this exists elsewhere, (maybe InDesign? I haven't used it much myself) but as far as I know no such functionality exists. It seems odd that it wouldn't because it's such a basic thing. Hmmm... If this were possible the design process could be sped up considerably and you could concentrate more on the layout, thinking in terms of objects and shapes rather than spending your time telling the computer to do what it could probably figure out for itself.