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SEPTEMBER 29, 2003 Up Close with the Adobe Creative Suite
Illustrator CS  Illustrator, one of the most mature creative applications on the market, receives a surprising number of changes as well. Adobe Illustrator 10, as you might recall, was an update focused primarily on workflow enhancements and fine-tuning some of the existing features. But Illustrator CS, in the context of an upgrade, is what you might call a crowd pleaser. It does have several "little" enhancements and under-the-hood improvements--the kinds of things you'd expect from an application of Illustrator's age--but it also has some more major improvements in the area of typography and one gigantic, completely new feature that allows you to create and manipulate 3D text and objects.[an error occurred while processing this directive]The new 3D functionality is obviously in response to Macromedia's Freehand, which introduced 3D extrusion in the latest MX release. Being familiar enough with Freehand's extrusion capabilities, I can say that while the idea Illustrator's 3D Extrude & Bevel feature may seem like a "me too" approach to application development, its implementation is anything but. I won't say, at this point, that it's better than Freehand's, but it is decidedly different. The most striking difference is Illustrator's ability to map artwork to an extruded object. So not only do you have the ability to pull 2D artwork into 3D space, but you also have the ability to decorate the surface as you see fit. In the example above, you see a pair of dice that have been mapped with a different image for each side of the objects. On top of this, you also have unlimited lights, with independent intensity control; you can blend 3D objects to create Flash animations; you can control various surface properties; and, since 3D objects remain editable, you can always make changes or release the extrusion to return to your original artwork. The other major changes are in the area of typography, where Illustrator's redesigned text engine gains capabilities previously available only in Adobe InDesign. This includes significant features like character and paragraph styles and support for advanced OpenType functionality, all the way down to little enhancements like the adoption of Optical Margin Alignment.  With character and paragraph styles, you can define any number of styles that include basic or advanced formatting, as well as OpenType options--including, for example, the ability to apply ligatures and reformat number combinations as fractions when the style is applied to text. For OpenType, Illustrator CS gains support for advanced features, such as an expanded number of glyphs, ligatures, discretionary ligatures, arbitrary fractions, swashes, etc.  Illustrator CS ships with more than 100 OpenType fonts from a variety of Western, Japanese, Chines and Korean families, including several OpenType Pro fonts. Some of these include: Bernhard Modern, Birch, Brush Script, Adobe Caslon Pro, Century Old Style, Charlemagne, Chaparral Pro, Courier, Adobe Garamond Pro, Giddyup, Letter Gothic, Lithos Pro, Mesquite, Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, Myriad, News Gothic, Nueva, Prestige Elite, Rosewood, Stencil, Trajan Pro, Viva, Wood Type Ornaments, Kozuka Mincho, Kozuka Gothic, Adobe Ming and Adobe Myungjo. Illustrator CS also includes Optical Kerning and Optical Margin Alignment features. Optical Kerning is designed to create optimal spacing with characters that might look awkward with standard kerning, such as slanted capital letters or letters whose graphemes might overlap with parentheses or other characters. It's also cumulative, so that characters can be adjusted further manually. Optical Margin Alignment is an option that allows you to hang punctuation (quotation marks, hyphens, etc.), as well as shifting some characters slightly to produce the appearance of properly aligned margins. Text areas are also enhanced with the ability to define multiple columns and rows, with custom widths, heights and horizontal and vertical gutters.  It also adds the Every-Line Composer for paragraph composition, which is designed to optimize word spacing and line breaks, minimize hyphenation and eliminate rivers. Other text enhancements include:
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