Adobe Illustrator 11.0 CS Win

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

T O P N E W F E A T U R E S
Advanced typographical controls Set sophisticated-looking type with new text composition controls, character and paragraph styles, automatic smart quotes and ligatures, and more.

Enhanced Adobe PDF file creation. Create native Adobe PDF files using settings and options consistent with Adobe Acrobat Distiller software.

Adobe PDF layers support. Create separate layers in Adobe PDF files that can be displayed or hidden within Adobe Acrobat 6.0 software to organize your work or to show different design options.

Faster performance. Work more efficiently with faster opening, saving, and printing of files; copying and pasting; and displaying of artwork.

3D effects. Create custom 3D shapes and type treatments, add lighting, and wrap artwork around shapes for packaging mock-ups.

Expanded print capabilities. Get fast, consistent print results with a streamlined interface and features like Fit to Page, Print Preview, and support for Print settings.

Tighter Microsoft Office integration. Easily export Illustrator graphics in a format optimized to print and display in Microsoft Office applications, such as Word and PowerPoint.

Save As Template command. Reuse designs by saving files as templates that include artboard dimensions, placeholder elements, styles, symbols, layers, and more.

Professionally designed content. Get projects off to a quick start with more than 200 professionally designed templates and over 100 OpenType fonts in addition to clip art and stock photographsall included free.

Video tour of new features. Learn how to use the new features in Illustrator CS with the special quickstart training video, included free.