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Adobe Illustrator

Overview || Features

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The industry-standard vector graphics creation software for print and Web!

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Adobe Illustrator 9.0 expands your creative freedom and enhances your productivity with its new Web graphics tools, versatile transparency capabilities, powerful object and layer effects, and other innovative features. Now you can use these fast, flexible tools to transform your creative ideas into sophisticated graphics for use on the Web, in print, or in dynamic media projects.

Overview

Getting Started

Tools and palettes
If you've worked with other Adobe applications, the Adobe Illustrator work area will look familiar, with the command menus at the top of the screen, the artwork window, the tool box, and the floating palettes. The Illustrator tool box contains tools for selecting, drawing, painting, and editing your artwork. The floating palettes contain additional features that help you monitor, modify, and enhance your artwork. You can hide and rearrange the tool box and palettes to organize your work area as needed.

The artwork window
You view, create, and edit your artwork inside the artwork window. The artwork window contains boundary lines that help you lay out your artwork in relation to the printable and nonprintable areas of your page.

Drawing

Basic paths and shapes
Creating a path in Illustrator can be as simple as selecting the Pencil tool and drawing in the artwork window. In addition to freeform paths, you can create round and sharp-cornered rectangles, ellipses, polygons, spirals, and stars using preset shape tools. You can build many types of graphic objects by starting with basic shapes and paths and then modifying or combining them.

The pen tool
The pen tool lets you draw straight lines and flowing curves. Although it is less intuitive to use than the pencil tool, the pen tool offers you the advantage of creating streamlined paths that can be controlled and reshaped with great precision. With a little practice, you'll be able to draw combinations of straight and curved segments to create flexible, smoothly shaped illustrations.

Editing

Selecting objects
Before your edits can take effect, you must first select the object to be modified. Any edits you make affect only the objects that are currently selected. Illustrator provides several tools for selecting objects or parts of objects.

Applying changes
Once you have selected an object or set of objects, you can begin making edits. Edits can range from the basic moving and duplicating of objects to more intricate modifications of shapes. Because Illustrator defines objects mathematically as vector graphics, you can edit your artwork repeatedly without losing any quality of detail. Vector objects always retain their smooth, crisp outlines, regardless of how they are scaled or modified.

Grouping objects
By gathering several objects together in a group, you can apply simultaneous edits to all the objects while preserving their relative positions. For example, you can group the individual elements of a flower illustration so that you can move and scale the flower as a single unit. You can also nest smaller groups inside larger groups to organize different levels of your artwork.

Color

Stylized strokes
The Paintbrush tool lets you paint colored strokes using a variety of artistic brush styles. Paintbrush strokes can be edited in the same manner as paths and other artwork objects. In addition to drawing new strokes with the paintbrush tool, you can decorate existing paths with a desired brush style.

Filling and stroking objects
Painting an object involves two parts. You apply a fill color to the object's interior and a stroke color to its border. The fill and stroke colors are chosen and edited independently.

Advanced fills and strokes
Illustrator gives you more advanced fill and stroke options such as patterns, gradients, and the ability to add multiple fills and strokes to a single object. In addition, you can apply versatile levels of transparency to the colors of objects.

Type

The type tool
You first select a type tool and set an insertion point for the type in your artwork. Then you enter the desired type using the keyboard.

Editing type
You use palette controls to specify traditional typesetting properties such as the font, size, kerning, leading, and tracking.

Applying graphic edits
You can use the Illustrator editing tools to move, copy, rotate, and graphically modify objects. You can also edit the fill, stroke and transparency of objects.

Enhanced productivity

Layers
The Layers palette lets you organize objects in your artwork on separate layers, which can be repositioned, restacked, and edited individually.

Swatches
The Swatches palette lets you add and edit new color and pattern swatches to create a custom swatch set stored with your artwork file when you save it. Whenever you copy an object from one document to another, any swatches associated with the object are added to the destination documents Swatches palette.

Actions
The Actions palette lets you record and save sets of program tasks that can be applied automatically to your artwork as batch processes.

Styles
The Styles palette lets you apply sets of appearance attributes, called graphic styles, to graphic and type objects in your artwork. Because styles are linked nondestructively to their objects, you can continue to reshape, resize, transform, and retype the objects with the assurance that the styles will update with your edits.

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Features

Super vector and raster Web graphics

Flash and SVG output
With Adobe Illustrator 9.0, you can preserve your artwork in vector form when exporting it for the Web. Illustrator 9.0 provides excellent support for exporting files to Flash (SWF) format, as well as to the new Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard. Both Web vector formats maintain high-quality artwork and fonts, while producing smaller file sizes and faster download times than bitmap formats. Flash is widely used to design vector-based Web pages and Web animations; when exporting graphics to this format, you have the option of exporting the entire graphic to a single SWF file; exporting each layer to a separate frame in a single SWF file; or exporting each layer to a separate SWF file.

SVG is an emerging, completely open standard that was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and numerous industry players, including Adobe Systems, IBM, Netscape, Sun, Corel, Hewlett-Packard, and others. The SVG standard provides all the benefits of the Flash format, plus support for the following features: Type 1 and TrueType fonts, extensible markup language (XML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), interactive actions, and dynamic HTML animation. When preparing SVG output, you can assign scripted events to objects using the SVG Interactivity palette, and then export that information with the file. Illustrator also ships with the SVG Viewer plug-in, which works with different browsers to play back SVG graphics and Web pages.

Pixel Preview
Because the vector artwork that you create in Adobe Illustrator will be rasterized upon output to the Web, it's useful to monitor your work in terms of pixels. Illustrator 9.0 lets you specify pixels as a global measurement unit for sizing, editing, and laying out your artwork. You can also preview your vector objects as they will appear when rasterized in a Web browser. Working in Pixel Preview mode guarantees that your objects will snap to the nearest pixel edge in order to minimize anti-aliasing. You can draw and edit artwork in this mode.

Instant drop shadows and glows, and live shapes
New commands under the Effect menu let you convert type and graphic objects to editable rectangular or elliptical shapes, which can be especially useful for creating Web buttons. These shapes can contain fully editable type objects and appearances; when you modify or transform a shape, its contents update automatically.

The Stylize commands under the Effect menu let you apply appearances such as drop shadows and glows directly to type and graphic objects while retaining full vector editability of the objects.

Release to Layers command
The new Release to Layers command lets you instantly distribute all of the objects on a layer onto separate, individual layers. You can use this feature to prepare files for further Web animation work in other applications that support layers. For example, you can prepare different frames of an animation by first applying blend options to objects or using the scatter brush to paint repeated copies of an object along a path. You can then release each object in the blend or scattered path to a separate layer, and export the file as a Flash (SWF) file or to Adobe Photoshop to set up the animation.

By pressing Shift as you choose the Release to Layers command, you can distribute objects onto separate layers in a cumulative sequence. For example, you can create a layer containing the first object, a layer containing the first and second objects, a layer containing the first, second, and third objects, and so on. This procedure is especially useful for building animation sequences.

Creative freedom

Unlimited transparency capabilities
The new Transparency palette In Adobe Illustrator 9.0 lets you apply transparency to any graphic object, bitmap image, or type character in your artwork so that underlying objects are partially or fully revealed. You can vary the transparency settings for every character, word, or paragraph in a text block, and even create cumulative effects by applying individual settings to characters and then applying an overall setting to an entire text block. Objects and text remain fully editable with transparency applied.

You also have the option of limiting transparency to a layer, to a group of objects, or to an object's stroke or fill to achieve different creative results. To apply transparency to multiple objects, simply Shift-click to select the objects and then set the transparency. To apply transparency to a layer, first target the layer in the Layers palette and then set the transparency. The transparency setting then affects the entire layer as a single object -- any graphics on the layer, and any you add later on, immediately assume the transparency of the layer.

Opacity and Layer mask
Two new masking features -- Opacity masks and Layer Clipping masks -- let you selectively hide and reveal areas of your artwork through custom shapes. Using the Transparency palette, you can define any object as an opacity mask, so that artwork attached to the mask takes on modified transparency. The grayscale equivalents of the colors in the mask correspond to different levels of mask transparency. By editing the shape, placement, and fill of the mask, you can achieve sophisticated effects such as variable transparency across an object.

Clipping masks, which are defined through the Layers palette, let you reveal a set of underlying objects through a clipping shape.

Feathering
The Feather command under the Effect > Stylize menu softens the transition between foreground and background objects. As with other effects, the feathering effect can be applied nondestructively to vector objects and type.

Overprint preview
With Adobe Illustrator 9.0, you can preview your overprint settings to proof trapping and spot-color effects before you go to press. You can, for example, preview on-screen how a spot-color object will overprint other objects.

Unparalleled productivity

Effects
Use the many commands under the new Effect menu in Adobe Illustrator 9.0 to apply nondestructive visual effects to graphic objects, bitmap images, and type in your artwork. These effects preserve the full editability of the objects to which they are applied; you can continue to reshape, resize, transform, and retype the objects with the assurance that the effects will update with your edits. You can even remove an effect from an object without having to re-create the object from scratch.

Graphic styles
The new Styles palette lets you create and save a set of appearance attributes, called a style, so that the style can be applied instantly to any number of graphic objects and type. Because styles are linked nondestructively to their objects, you can continue to reshape, resize, transform, and retype the objects with the assurance that the styles will update with your edits. A style can consist of a combination of attributes, including multiple fill and stroke colors, gradients, patterns, effects, filters, transparency, blending modes, and transformations. To edit an existing style, use the new Appearance palette to view the contents of the style, and then modify, reorder, add, or delete the attributes as needed.

Enhanced layer controls
The Layers palette provides a number of display and ordering enhancements that can help you organize, rearrange, and monitor your artwork elements with improved precision and efficiency. Now you can display an expanded hierarchy of elements directly in the Layers palette with thumbnail previews, starting with top-level layers, then groups nested inside the layers, and finally objects nested inside the groups. You can also nest layers inside other layers, and reorder any element by dragging it up or down in the Layers palette. Other enhancements include the Release to Layers command for automatically generating separate layers, clipping masks for shaping the display of artwork, and the ability to target elements in the Layers palette as recipients of style and appearance attributes.

Enhanced layer controls
Native support for Adobe PDF The Adobe Illustrator 9.0 file format is now Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) at its core, making it easier to prepare these compact files for handoff. This transition in file formats is transparent because the Illustrator file extension is still .ai, and Illustrator can still open and save previous versions of its files (back to version 1.0). However, you can now roundtrip PDF files that you've saved from Illustrator without losing any file features, such as fonts, patterns, or vertical text blocks. Plus, you have a complete set of compression, font embedding, color management, security, and other settings available for quickly preparing PDF files for high-end output. Future versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader will be able to open, view, and print native Illustrator files because they are PDF-based.

Tight integration

Integration with Adobe's print publishing programs
The many new and enhanced features of Adobe Illustrator 9.0 make it an even more useful and integrated tool in the desktop print-publishing workflow. To begin with, the look and feel of the command menus, toolbox, palettes, and keyboard shortcuts reflect the standard user interface common to many Adobe programs. Illustrator also provides superior support for a number of exportable features, such as layers, transparency, blending modes, editable text, and filters. Illustrator 9.0 offers superb integration with Adobe Photoshop. When opening a Photoshop file in Illustrator, you can preserve masks, blending modes, and transparency, and convert layers to separate Illustrator objects. When exporting an Illustrator file to Photoshop format, you can preserve layers, opacity masks, transparency, blending modes, and editable type.

Integration with Adobe's Web design programs
The new and improved Web workflow of Adobe Illustrator 9.0 makes it easier than ever to export files to other Adobe Web design programs such as GoLive 5.0 and LiveMotion. You can place native Illustrator graphics directly in GoLive 5.0 files for efficient one-step optimization to Web formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, SWF, and SVG. You can also bring Illustrator artwork into LiveMotion for further animation, interactivity, and sound enhancements.

Expanded file format support
Adobe Illustrator 9.0 can open or place files saved in the following formats: Illustrator (any version), EPS, Adobe PDF (one page at a time), Adobe Photoshop (versions 2.5 and later), Macromedia FreeHand (versions 5.0, 5.5, 7.0, and 8.0), CorelDRAW (versions 5.0 through 8.0), Amiga IFF, BMP, CGM, DWG, DXF, EMF/WMF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, Kodak Photo CD, PICT, PCX, PXR, TGA, and TIFF. Illustrator 9.0 can save or export files in the following formats: Illustrator, EPS, PDF, Flash (SWF), SVG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, Photoshop (including layers), Amiga IFF, BMP, CGM (version 1), EMF/WMF, DWG, DXF, PICT, PCX, PXR, TGA, and TIFF. Illustrator 9.0 can save or export files in the following formats: Illustrator, EPS, PDF, Flash (SWF), SVG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, Photoshop (including layers), Amiga IFF, BMP, CGM (version 1), EMF/WMF, DWG, DXF, PICT, PCX, PXR, TGA, and TIFF.

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System Requirements:

Windows

  • Pentium II or faster Intel processor
  • Microsoft Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows 2000 operating system
  • 64 MB of RAM
  • 105 MB of available hard-disk space
  • CD-ROM drive
  • Video card that supports 800x600 or greater monitor resolution
  • If using Adobe PostScript printers: Adobe PostScript Level 2 or later required

Macintosh

  • Any PowerPC processor
  • Mac OS software versions 8.5, 8.6 or 9.0
  • 64 MB of RAM
  • 105 MB of available hard-disk space
  • CD-ROM drive
  • 800x600 or greater monitor resolution
  • If using Adobe PostScript printers: Adobe PostScript Level 2 or later required

Adobe Illustrator 9.0
Windows Edition $479
Macintosh Edition $479


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