Use New Features in Illustrator CS

Illustrator CS refines a program that has been used by graphic art professionals for years . It s more stable, manages memory better in OSX and Windows XP, and includes a few new features.

One of the most dramatic additions to Illustrator is the inclusion of 3-D effects similar to, but very much scaled down from, those that came with Adobe s semi- abandoned Dimensions 3-D imaging program. You ll experiment with these 3-D tools in Chapter 14.

The other area of dramatic improvement is in text formatting and control. Illustrator CS introduces much smoother and more helpful tools for paragraph formatting, flowing text between blocks, and better dictionary and search and replace tools. Find and Replace features are beefed up and allow searches for special characters (such as paragraph or line breaks). You ll explore these improved text features in Part III of this book.

Note  

Because type and font management is so improved in Illustrator CS, when you open a file created in an older version of Illustrator, you'll be prompted to convert that Legacy (Adobe's term for older versions of Illustrator) type to type that utilizes the new features of Illustrator CS.

Illustrator CS has added much more powerful support for extended Open Type character sets. Open type makes it possible to include hundreds of characters in a single font set, and Illustrator s new type features make Open type characters easy to use.

Other updates include Illustrator s ability to save to new graphic formats (JPEG 2000) and to export more accurately to Adobe s InDesign desktop publishing program. Illustrator CS artwork even meshes better with Microsoft Office programs than artwork created in version 10 does.

While Illustrator CS fine tunes and improves on versions 9 and 10, readers using those versions will have little trouble using this book as a guide. You ll simply note a missing feature here and there. If you find you need that feature, upgrade. If not, use this book with your old version of Illustrator.