Adobe's new Illustrator CS brings significant improvements to an already great vector art software. I was quite impressed with Illustrator 10's improvements, and wasn't sure what new features Adobe would put into its next version. Plenty, as it turns out. Here are some new features of Illustrator CS (actually v. 11):Faster Performance
Illustrator CS is noticeably faster opening, saving, and printing files than its predecessor Illustrator 10. Artwork displays faster, and copying and pasting is speedier.
Expanded Print Capabilities
With Illustrator CS' upgraded print engine you can now achieve fast, consistent, print results with features like Fit to Page, Print Preview, and support for Print settings. These features appear to put Illustrator CS on par with Adobe Acrobat in regard to setting file compression and printing control.
Font Style Display
In its drop-down Font selection menu, Illustrator CS now shows fonts available in your Mac in their actual style. No more guessing how they might look before you select from a list of font names.
Enhanced Adobe PDF file creation
When saving an Illustrator CS document as a PDF file a menu now displays settings and options that are quite similar to Adobe Acrobat Distiller software. This allows making precise adjustments for file compression, adding printer's marks, and setting PDF document security. A convenient feature is that newly created Illustrator PDF's are then auto-launched in Acrobat 6 for immediate review.
Adobe PDF layers support
Similar to PhotoShop, Illustrator lets artwork be created over numerous electronic layers with individual control of the contents contained on each layer. That's not particularly new, however, layered artwork in Illustrator CS saved as a PDF can now be displayed or hidden within Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional.
How might this be useful? One example could be that you need to e-mail a drawing to a client showing multiple design options for a building drawn on different layers in Illustrator. The client won't likely have Illustrator, but will have a copy (or can get a free download) of Acrobat Reader 6. With a multi-layer PDF file the client can turn on, or off, layers to display your different design options.
3D Effects
I love this new feature! From 2-D objects and text you can create custom 3-D shapes and type treatments, add lighting, and then wrap artwork around shapes for packaging mock-ups. The new 3-D features incorporate elements of Adobe's long abandoned Dimensions 3.1 which, while promising, was clunky and rather frustrating to use.
Prior to Illustrator CS, I usually created 3-D static objects by first importing a very basic Illustrator EPS drawing into an expensive 3-D animation program. From there I would perform an Extrude (adding depth to the object) or a Lathe (wrapping the EPS drawing around a center line), rotate the object to a desired angle in the XYZ planes, position the artificial light source(s), and then map artwork to the various surfaces to create the finished product. Now I can do all of that in Illustrator CS. Thank you, Adobe! I'll be interested to see how this feature matures in future versions of Illustrator.
Illustrator's 3-D features come with a price, however. Running this program on my 15", 800 Mhz, G4 iMac required patience as each time a 3-D object was moved or resized on the electronic canvas there was a finger-drumming wait for the vector recalculations to complete. Of course faster Macs (especially the G5's) will mean less wait time with Illustrator 3-D objects.
Video Tour Of New Features
Included with Illustrator CS is a very informative CD video tutorial from Total Training featuring well-known software book author and presenter Deke McClelland. He jumps right into explaining the 3-D features of Illustrator CS, followed by tutorials on the program's built-in filters, font features, printing controls, and exports to PDF and Microsoft Office.
Tighter Microsoft Office integration
When you choose "Save for Microsoft Office" under the File Menu, Illustrator CS exports artwork as a PNG file format which makes it optimized to print and display in Microsoft Office products. Frankly, I'm not so impressed with this feature-but it's probably not Adobe's fault.
Of the applications in the Microsoft Office application suite I use PowerPoint the most. Inserting a PNG (or other raster formats) is fine as long as the background in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint is white. In these Microsoft products all pixel-based images display with a white square or rectangular bounding box-no matter the actual shape of the artwork. In PowerPoint you can use Microsoft's "Set Color Transparency" command to make the unwanted white of the bounding box become transparent so the background shows through. Unfortunately, there remains a white "fringing" all around the artwork boundary.
If Illustrator had a vector graphic export format that would be the same as the vector clip art Microsoft provides for use in its Office products, you would really have something. Vector art from Illustrator, brought into MS Office software, could be scaled up or down in size with no change in resolution. Now that would be a great feature. As it currently stands, you can put a piece of vector art into the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery. But when the artwork is inserted the MS application forcibly rasterizes it with some unwanted results.
Save As Template Command
Illustrator CS lets you reuse designs by saving files as templates that include artboard dimensions, styles, symbols, layers, and more. There are also more than 200 professionally designed templates and over 100 OpenType fonts in addition to clip art and stock photographs - all included free on the installation CD.
Adobe states that Illustrator CS for Macintosh requires a PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 CPU, OS X v.10.2 through v.10.3, 192MB of RAM (256MB recommended), and 470MB of available hard-disk space. For this review, Illustrator CS performed on a G4 800 MHz iMac with 1 GB of memory, running OS 10.2.8.
Tom Shackle is a member of the Alaskan Apple Users Group and a freelance media professional
