Don't let the version number fool you: Adobe Illustrator 6.0 is not a dramatic upgrade. In fact, it may be the least substantial full upgrade in Illustrator history. The core program remains virtually unchanged since version 5.5, with modifications restricted almost exclusively to plugins. Even so, if you’re a true-blue Illustrator user who’d rather eat rocks than switch to Macromedia FreeHand 5.5, then you’ll want to upgrade to Illustrator 6 as soon as possible. The enhancements are few in number, hut they eliminate many of the headaches associated with previous versions.
Except for a minor gradient hiccup in version 5, printing from Illustrator has always been extremely reliable; now it's easier to use. You can print color separations directly from Illustrator 6 without resorting to the Separator utility. If you encounter PostScript errors (such as limitcheck), you can convert gradients into blends, and tile patterns into objects, using the new Expand command. These enhancements are hardly exciting — in a perfect world, Illustrator would have always offered such options — but they make printing less of a nuisance.
TIFFs Were Meant to Be Tagged
In 1988, FreeHand 2.0 introduced support for TIFF images. More than seven years later, Illustrator follows suit. In fact, Illustrator has gone positively nuts in the compatibility department, importing or exporting a total of 15 file formats, including Kodak Photo CD, JPEG, and flattened Adobe Photoshop 3 images. Best of all, Illustrator 6 includes a new EPS parser that lets you open drawings created in FreeHand and other programs. I was able to open every illustration I tried, including a few that contained imported images and custom PostScript fill patterns. Only text proved a problem, sometimes breaking into hundreds of separate blocks.
But while Illustrator’s TIFF support comes as welcome news, its implementation suffers. Where FreeHand wisely tags TIFF files on disk — the T in TIFF stands for tagged, after all — Illustrator imports every pixel and converts the image into its internal PostScript format. This means more work for Illustrator and more waiting for you. For example, I imported two Photo CD images into both FreeHand 5.5 and Illustrator 6. In FreeHand, it took a few seconds to import the images, and the completed illustration consumed 33K on disk. In Illustrator, it took a whopping 14 minutes to import the images, and the finished illustration consumed 44MB — more than 1000 times the drive space that the FreeHand file took.
FreeHand speeds up screen redraw by letting you control the on-screen resolution of an imported TIFF image, making screen redraw nearly instantaneous; Illustrator lacks image-redraw controls and at times is unbearably slow. On the other hand, Illustrator wisely tags EPS images on disk and imports just the PICT preview, so if you want to import large images, you're better off sticking with the EPS format, just like in the old days.
Illustrator and Photoshop
Since the overwhelming majority of Illustrator artists also use Photoshop, Adobe has built a virtual bridge between the two. You can now drag objects from Illustrator and drop them into Photoshop. Photoshop rasterizes the objects on the fly according to the resolution of the image window, so higher resolutions yield more pixels. You can likewise drag images from Photoshop into Illustrator, but only at 72 dpi. You need System 7.5 and lots of RAM (at least 32MB) to take advantage of drag and drop, but to its credit, Illustrator relies on the Mac’s native drag-and-drop functions, rather than infesting your system with Microsoft OLE (as its sibling Adobe PageMaker does).
You can also rasterize objects directly within Illustrator, lift colors from pixels using the eyedropper, and apply Photoshop-compatible filters to imported images. Illustrator supports a wider range of Photoshop filters than FreeHand does, including the external filters that ship with Photoshop. The one caveat is that you cannot apply a filter to a tagged EPS image, so you have two choices: either import an image in its entirety and retain the option to filter it, or tag the EPS file on disk and do without filters. There is no need for such a trade-off in FreeHand.
Plug-ins Come of Age
In version 5, Adobe opened up Illustrator to third-party plug-ins. To get the ball rolling, Adobe threw in a few plug-ins of its own. Illustrator 6 expands plug-ins, permitting them to appear as commands or tools. Where you once had to choose commands and enter numerical data to create polygons, stars, and spirals, you can now drag with tools. Illustrator equips the tools with lots of keyboard tricks, allowing you to add sides to a polygon or modify the twist of a spiral as you draw the shape. These are some of the best tools for creating primitives (simple shapes) that I've seen.
Version 6 also adds curve fitting, which lets Illustrator distort paths accurately, For example, where the old Twirl filter merely moved points around, the new Twirl command adds points inteligently and bends segments with mathematical precision... Only a handful of Illustrator's commands take advantage of the new curve fitting, but this feature should be a boon to third-party plug-in developers that do not include curve-fitting capabilities of their own.
Other plug-in improvements include a floating palette of alignment and distribution options and a Control palette for quickly moving, scaling, and rotating whole objects. A new Path Pattern filter lets you apply specially constructed tile patterns to the stroke of a path. Illustrator can stretch and bend the tiles (again using curve fitting) so that the tiles follow a path's twists and turns like diamonds along the back of a rattlesnake.
The knife function — implemented both as a tool and a command — is the rotten apple in the new crop of plug-ins. Designed to create free-form slices through filled objects, it seems to have missed the testing cycle. The knife has a habit of deleting unfilled paths, particularly closed ones. You can spare unfilled paths by pressing the control key, but this essential trick goes undocumented. And a documented technique for duplicating sliced paths by double-clicking on the knife tool icon doesn’t work.
FreeHand Stands Tall
When all is said and done, FreeHand 5.5 retains a few key advantages, especially in the realm of blends. Illustrator’s reliance on a tool instead of a command makes blending more cumbersome than it should be; the blend function is notorious for generating errors if you don’t click according to rigid specifications; and Illustrator can't redraw blends when you move, edit, or recolor shapes.
Illustrators autotracing function is similarly inferior. Despite Illustrator 6's support for a multitude of image formats, black-and-white tracing templates are limited to PICT or MacPaint formats. You can't adjust the template after importing it, and Illustrator can trace only one path at a time.
FreeHand also continues to be the faster program, especially where text and imported images are concerned. FreeHand lets you mix page sizes in one document, automatically advance from one page to the next, and zoom and scroll with far more precision. And perhaps most important, only FreeHand 5.5 exists on both platforms. Illustrator for Windows has stalled at version 4.1, essentially the equivalent of Illustrator 3 for the Mac.
The Last Word
Illustrator does offer its share of advantages. Even FreeHand devotees admit Illustrator’s pen tool is a work of art. Illustrator also provides better gradients, masking, guidelines, and transformation capabilities in addition to shape-creation tools, curve fitting, and Photoshop support. But the plain fact is that FreeHand has made more substantial progress than Illustrator in the last two years and looks poised to continue moving aggressively into Illustrator’s territory. If FreeHand doesn't interest you, then the changes in Illustrator 6 justify the $99 upgrade cost. But if you're on the edge, give FreeHand 5.5 a serious look before making your decision.
McClelland, Deke. (April 1996). Adobe Illustrator 6.0. Macworld. (pgs. 54-55).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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illustrator_6.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
