Area Type (lower right) also appears underlined, but is also enclosed within a shape that contains small boxes on the upper left and lower right sides (those boxes are called 'ports' and we'll talk about them in detail in a moment).

Note that the line endings shown here are manual, using hard or soft returns. Point Type (lower left) shows a single point on the first line and other lines are underlined. Normally, it's pretty easy to make a distinction between Point and Area Type simply by looking at it when it is selected. Area Type is used for larger blocks of text where lines flow from one line to the next and are encompassed within a shape or a frame (just a note here - I'm using the term 'frame' here only because it's a familiar term for InDesign users, but Illustrator really has no concept of a frame at all). Point Type is used most often for random text objects that appear in your document and aren't bound by any shape or frame. The first thing to understand is that Illustrator has two types of text objects - one called Point Type and one called Area Type. The reason why I get questions about this stems from the fact that it often seems that sometimes it DOES work as the user wants it to, while other times, it doesn't - which leads to frustration and other acts of computer violence. Much like in InDesign, the user is looking to simply resize the frame, allowing the text within to simply reflow.

For example, some users are looking to scale their text frames, but find that the text within the frame becomes scaled as well.

I often get questions with regards to scaling text.

How to scale text in illustrator