How to monospace fonts in Illustrator?

Question

I can't seem to find this feature - is it possible to do this in Illustrator?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Good responses here, but I just wanted to add in one other solution. This is painstaking but I'm having to do it for a project. I literally need a grid of text. I'd much rather just have a monospace font. Illustrator, if you're listening, a "Force Monospace" option would be excellent for UI designers, puzzle designers, and a lot of other people. People go to illustrator to do the odd jobs that other programs can't do. This feature would be at home here.
The basic idea is to use linked text boxes and flowing text. This will be much easier to do in InDesign, since that program was born to flow text. I find it hard to click the flow button in CS5 and you can't hold option to continue the linkage process like you can in InDesign.
Anyways, details on how to do this below. If you absolutely need a monospace layout of text glyphs, and don't have a monospace font to work with, and need to work in illustrator, this should work. I'm not saying that it will look good or be legible, and I guarantee you'll curse Illustrator because this would be very easy for them to add in as a feature.
1) Click and drag out a rectangular text box. Don't just click and start typing, you need an actual type box.
2) Enter your text and style your text how you want it.  Use the increased tracking method, posted above, if you want to see  roughly what it will look like.
3) Decrease the tracking so it's 0 after you have everything styled.
4) Add an uppercase M to the beginning of your text. That's typically (no pun intended) the widest character in most fonts.
5) Resize the text box width so all you can see is that first M. You can make it a little wider just to be safe.
6) Drag out a copy of that text box, and delete the text from the new one.
7) Drag out copies of this empty text box. They should "flow" from left to right for English or other left-to-right languages. You should have as many boxes as you have letter in your final text.
8) Link the text boxes: first click on your text box that has your placeholder text. You should see a red overflow [+] sign on the right side of the box. Click that.
9) Click the edges of the next text box and you should see text flow from one box to the next.
10) Rinse and repeat until all your boxes are filled. As you're doing this, you'll have multiple smaller letters filling up smaller boxes. There are two way to solve this:
11A) Hit enter after each character to force the text to the next text box. This is cumbersome.
11B) Increase tracking to a very high number or something that will prohibit two characters from occupying the same box. This is good if you are going to want to edit the type after the fact.
12) Horizontally align your boxes, center your text, and you're done.