|
|
NOVEMBER 19, 2003 Adobe Illustrator CS
Workflow, performance, integration and other 'under the hood' improvements Of course, as you would expect with a major update to Illustrator, the new version also continues Adobe's long tradition of (usually) making a good thing even better with a full suite of "under the hood" improvements. [an error occurred while processing this directive]In the area of performance, Illustrator CS is a big winner. Huge winner. Just in the time spared when saving files, I'm satisfied with regard to performance. It doesn't seem to matter how complex or numerous the objects are in my document; saving takes a second or two, where it used to take literally minutes in some cases. It;s also faster at copying and pasting, applying some effects and drawing objects onscreen. Also, significantly, navigation is much, much faster. Let's say you have a complex object off screen. What happens when you try to scroll the document to reveal the object? You have to wait as Illustrator draws it piece by piece. Now, however, Illustrator has adopted a feature similar to that found in After Effects--the ability to dumb down a graphic in order to speed up navigation. So you can scroll (or move with the Hand tool) anywhere you want without the slightest delay in screen redraw. When you stop scrolling or moving your document, Illustrator then draws the full-resolution object. Just beautiful. Almost every area of Illustrator's performance is improved, though I will says that things like the 3D effects and the Adobe Every-Line Composer can still slow things down a bit. In terms of workflow, there are so many little niceties in Illustrator CS that it's difficult to enumerate all of them. In fact, I keep discovering new, subtle enhancements every day that I use this software, which is, of course, everyday. This includes things like automatically selecting the Text tool when double-clicking on a text box and placing the insertion point wherever you were tapping. It includes easier scaling and rotation of objects without having to select the proper tool for doing so. You can drag objects by their handles not to scale them and click just outside the object's bounding box to rotate them. (The old Scale and Rotate tools are still present in the Tools palette, for those who like them.) And there are tons of other little improvements, like not having to switch to the Selection tool to apply rows and columns to area text; having the ability to load and save brushes, swatches, symbols and styles from their respective palettes; the ability to sample colors from placed bitmap graphics; more Eyedropper and Paint Bucket options; etc. Then there are the medium-sized workflow improvements. Consider text wrap as an example. In Illustrator 10, first of all, you couldn't even make text wrap around a bitmap graphic without first drawing a path around it manually. Then you had to select both the text box and the path (making sure the path was in front in the stacking order) to apply the wrap, which grouped the two objects together and gave you no freedom to play around with the objects whatsoever. Now it's all different. First off, you can now apply text wrap to any object you want, including bitmap graphics, and you don't have to "group" the object with your text frame. So you can move the object or text frame around anywhere you wish, and the text wraps interactively. Also important in this area--and something I have yet to see documented anywhere--is Illustrator's new ability to use transparency in Photoshop documents to define text wrap areas. This is also something that carries over from InDesign, which has had this ability since version 2.0.  The only limitation here is that unlike InDesign, Illustrator does not give you a choice between using the bounding box or alpha channel(s) to define the text wrap. Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Film and Video Magazine • Presentation Master • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
|