Adobe Creative Suite 4

The latest version offers a lot of flexibility to designers. In the second part of the series we look at the new features in Illustrator and Acrobat Pro

Monday, June 01, 2009

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Last month we discussed some of the exciting new features in Photoshop and InDesign. Now is the time to check two other equally important tools in this suite, Illustrator and Acrobat 9 Pro. Before we continue, it would be worth mentioning that CS4 is optimized for 64-bit operating systems and so it provides high editing speed, quick switching amongst applications and faster rendering.

Illustrator CS4
Just to remind you, it is a vector based drawing application that is meant for graphic and web designers. Its new and improved interface allows you to open multiple Illustrator files in a single window. Each file is shown as a tab with the filename as the name of the tab. For reducing the time to open a tab again and again, you can now just click the tab which opens the desired file.

CS4 allows you to create multiple pages or artboards in a single window. By default all artboards are of the same size and equally positioned within the window. But, the suite provides great deal of flexibility to change the size and position of individual artboards, and even allows you to overlap different artboards. The designer can see the same job created on different page sizes in a singe window and a maximum of 100 artboards can place in a single window.

Illustrator CS4 had a new brush tool called 'Blob Brush Tool,' which represents a new way to paint an illustration. Painting with this brush gives an already filled object rather than creating a new path with brush strokes applied to them. Illustrator gives the outline filled objects which can be edited later. Any new shape painted with the same color and stroke will automatically merge with existing shapes, with the same settings, and it pick up style attributes from other objects.

One of the commonly used 'Gradient' tool has seen a pretty useful upgrade with this version. Earlier, when drawing a rectangle, one used to click on the rectangle object and then on the Gradient menu to draw a gradient color. Now, it shows a panel or a line inside the rectangle, called 'interactive gradient editor' panel. Like the earlier versions, there is no need to open the 'Gradient' window every time, to apply any changes. The designer can work directly on his work because the 'panel' is on top. Click on the panel and drag it anywhere or stretch and rotate it. Also it's possible to move the gradient stops, change the color and adjust the opacity directly on the image. This tool enhancement gives a new way to paint in illustration and reduce the time to open the gradient window every time.

Acrobat 9 Pro
This is one of the most popular software to send magazine articles, news, fillable forms, etc through mail. These docs can be published on the Web pages without any loss of information or style. The latest version, Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro comes packed with a lot of new features and creates PDFs more precisely. It helps business professionals to communicate and collaborate more effectively and securely with virtually anyone. This version can combine different types of files into a professional PDF portfolio and maintain the original layers and meta data.

Open Acrobat 9 Pro and go to File >Create PDF >from Web Page or Advance >Web Capture >Create PDF from Web page to open a new URL. Give the URL address and select the number of levels, to start PDF creation. Higher the levels, the more the time taken to create a PDF. You can also play multimedia files from the Web page.

Web capture capability has improved a great deal, which allows users to save the entire Web page or some of its parts. The latest version supports audio, video and animation inside the PDF. Anyone can see the multimedia content on a PDF file. They can open a PDF file like a web page and click on the multimedia item to play, start the embedded Flash movies, without any media player application like Windows or VLC Media Players.

The PDF files are clear and sharper than before because the new version supports the scanners and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. While scanning, earlier versions of Acrobat, created only an image of that page, there was no provision to change the text. Acrobat 9 Pro allows a scan of an image containing text and creates a PDF, where text is editable. Acrobat 9, converts the image of the document into actual text using OCR. This technology eases the task of searching the desired sentence or words. The same way, it is easy to convert a PDF file to Microsoft Word format with font, layout and tables. The new Form Wizard converts Microsoft Word or Excel documents into PDF forms very. These PDF forms can be sent to other people to fill the details electronically using Adobe Reader. The Form Wizard creates forms from paper or electronic documents. The Form Tracker will monitor, how many people completed the form and collect data electronically. After all the forms have been completed,
you easily export the collected data to a spreadsheet for future reference.

Bottomline: Some useful time saving features such as the ability to compare multiple pages in a window and view multimedia files in PDF, without media player support, make it worth a buy.

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