Adobe's vector drawing program, Illustrator CS, is designed for most types of illustration and original drawing not primarily based on photographic images. Working with "vector" lines and curves, which are modified by editing nodes and control points, the drawing and editing tools provided cover most graphic art tasks. Taking a leaf out of some entry-level design packages, Illustrator CS includes a wide range of pre-designed templates and sample artwork. These provide a quick way in to new documents, while removing much of the basic layout work. As a source of ideas, these provide useful stepping stones to quick artworks.
It's something of a surprise that Adobe has only just got around to including 3-D tools in Illustrator. Its main competitor, CorelDraw, has had these since version 3, released 12 years ago. Adobe does it well, with new Revolve and Extrude commands producing solids of rotation and extrusions that can be coloured and lit.
The other new effect, "Scribble", adds to the 70-odd shape effects in Illustrator's library. It produces informal and child-like looking graphics from regular curves and shapes.
Type support has been improved by the introduction of paragraph and character styles, helping to ensure consistency throughout documents and support for OpenType fonts. These new fonts, jointly developed by Adobe and Microsoft, can be used across Macintosh and Windows platforms and support both Unicode and alternative character sets, such as swash characters in some display and fancy typefaces.
Work has been done to improve the integration of Illustrator CS with both Photoshop CS and Microsoft's Office. You can transfer images between Photoshop and Illustrator without having to keep separate copies in two different formats, and the "Save for Microsoft Office" option controls format options to ensure compatibility with PowerPoint, Word and Excel.
Other improvements include enhanced support for PDF files, Illustrator's native format; version support, useful for working on illustrations in a team environment; and some tidying up of page setup and separation controls into a new comprehensive print dialogue.
Illustrator CS remains a heavyweight design tool with tight integration into Photoshop, InDesign and Adobe's other professional level graphics applications. --Simon Williams
