Make the bottom box's top edge be close to the bottom edge of the top box.Make the top box have one line of text and set it to auto-size.Make 2 text boxes, place them into one column, one above the other both visually and in the layers panel too. For Illustrator at least one upward-flexing column allows for myriad of design possibilities. This is too bad as it disallows arbitrary continuations of the push-down effect propagation, but working with threaded variable text-content to such a degree is indisputably the domain of InDesign. Unfortunately the auto-size option is disabled for threaded textboxes. It even works when the last text frame in the column is threaded to another one. This remarkably works with a chain of such area-texts in a column. Setting this mode on an auto-sized area textbox will have the effect of pushing down any text of an area-textbox below it (visually as well as in the stacking order). Once activated, the text-wrapped object now has a repelling (or in the case of inversion, containing) force-field which causes any touching text characters in surrounding overlapping textboxes which are below in the stacking order to avoid it. The Text-Wrap feature in Illustrator lives inside the "Object" menu-bar item, and it can be set for any kind of Illustrator art object. In order to accomplish this feat, we will use one 'recent' (CC2014) feature called " Area-Type Auto-Size" and one old-faithful dinosaur called " Text-Wrap". The basic example is a column with a heading, sub-heading and body text where each element pushes down on the next one as it increases in size due to new variable data being populated in. This would be ideal for cases where a columnar group of text is needed to flex upwards, and where distinct paragraph elements need to be present to reflect the different character styles for the presentation. In an example of 'teaching an old dog new tricks', an Illustrator work-around can be achieved to simulate flexible column block text elements. Should the heading or sub-heading be composed of one, two or three lines, all of the text reflows upwards or downwards, maintaining the configured vertical spacing between the lines of text. Thus it's trivial within InDesign to use a dynamic & all differently-styled: heading, sub-heading, and body paragraph all within one text-frame. These by definition take up one less line of text if the variable content is short enough to not cause a text-wrap within the column one (more) time. One of the biggest issues with a lack of in-line variables is the accommodation they provide which is taken for granted in InDesign: the upward flexing of varying text ranges. A common problem sub-set: 'blank line flexing' While this may deter some users, for those whom Illustrator features may outweigh the constraints in certain situations, let us take a look at one common problem which can be addressed within Illustrator in a round-about way. As opposed to in-line variables, Illustrator only handles 'element' variables, where the variable content replaces the text inside the entire text box element - destroying any pre-styled nested text range styles. In-line variables refer to the InDesign-style text variable which can occupy a number of words or characters in a text-range within a document text-box. What used to be the key feature to drive variable-data users to consider InDesign as the primary vdp tool? The ability to perform a simple CSV import! Now that Adobe's incorporated a very basic import following the VariableImporter script's exploration of user cases, the very next such feature to still keep most users in InDesign is: the lack of in-line text variables inside of Illustrator! While those could be simulated when using scripting to perform variable-data processing, natively-speaking, we appear to be out of luck.
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