What is Adobe Illustrator 7?

The newest upgrade for Adobe Illustrator, version 7.0, is just like Christmas — for Windows users. For them, Illustrator 7.0 offers a cornucopia of gifts — filters, layers, gradients — everything the Mac version has had since 5.0. (This feature parity is a real blessing for people who work in a mixed-platform environment.) The new Macintosh features in Illustrator 7.0 consist mainly of interface changes and production-oriented additions. Some of these features are nice, but discovering them is sort of like finding out that the only gifts under the tree are underwear and a sweater from Aunt Sylvia.

New Interface

Since Adobe’s release of Photoshop 4,0, and continuing with PageMaker 6.5 and Illustrator 7.0, the company has given all its programs one coherent interface. This continuity is supposed to help people who work in all three applications and to offer longtime Photoshop users a more welcoming environment. Even Illustrator die-hards will appreciate some aspects of the overhaul. For example. Illustrator 7.0 assigns key- strokes for all its toolbox entries. Just tapping P-M-V-R switches from Pen to Rectangle to Selection to Rotate. It’s a big timesaver we’ve been missing.

Conversely, some changes will unnerve Illustrator users. Why is the Rectangle tool the M key? Well, Photoshop’s Rectangle tool is M, for Marquee. But unlike Photoshop, in which the Oval and Rectangle Marquees toggle, Illustrator has two distinct tools, and the Oval tool is N. Why not 0? Because 0 invokes the Reflect tool. I'm sure there’s a logic in here someplace. It’s just a little hard to understand. Also, important commands, such as Add Anchor Points or Offset Path, have moved off the Filter menu, and there’s no way to reapply the commands via a keystroke. On top of this, there are inconsistencies in the commands that will bother even those who come from Photoshop. Select Inverse has a keystroke command in Photoshop but not in Illustrator. Select None is Command-D in Photoshop but Command-Shift-A in Illustrator.

Also, there are some Photoshop features we would have loved to see but didn’t, such as the Actions palette, incremental magnification amounts, and the new Navigator palette. And Adobe made one big goof in version 7.0: its handling of the None fill. Setting a fill of None is one of the most important things you would want to do in Illustrator. But in its zeal to make the Colors palette similar to Photoshop’s, Adobe dropped the None option; it also failed to add a None option to the new Swatches palette. The only way to specify using no fill in an object is by clicking in the toolbox or by pressing the slash key. One word: bad.

A New World of Images and Color

Working with images and color is much improved, finally. Adobe did a lot to fix version 6’s disastrous handling of embedded TIFF images. Now, when you place TIFFs, you have an option to turn on or off linking. However, once you place a file, it’s not easy to change it from linked to unlinked, especially if you applied any transformations. Fortunately, placing a TIFF image no longer means that Illustrator’s screen redraw grinds to a halt, as so often happened in Illustrator 6.

Finally, RGB color (and Apple ColorSync 2.0) comes to Illustrator! This is a godsend for anyone who works in something other than a prepress environment. Whatever your favorite color model — CMYK, RGB, HLS, or grayscale — Illustrator 7.0 lets you choose it, unlike Illustrator 6, with its CMYK-only stance. You even can use a 216-color browser-safe palette. Also, Web designers now have the ability to turn their Illustrator artwork into image maps with embedded URLs; currently they’re limited, however, to specifying rectangular areas (a third-party application still is needed to make circles or irregular shapes).

Grids and Other Goodies

Illustrator 7.0 ships with a terrific new system of automatic grids, which you may set up in any color or configuration. Not only can you work with Snap to Grid turned on, but also the grid provides feedback, which helps you make compound paths correctly. (Anyone who has ever thrown a gradient behind an object in order to tell the difference between a White and a None fill will appreciate this feature.) Also, when you constrain angle, the grid changes along with the new angle. This is absolutely terrific for people who work in perspective.

Two more new features are worth noting. The first is vertical text orientation along a path (this release of Illustrator supports the Latin alphabet and Japanese characters only — other two-byte languages will be supported in future updates). The second is the ability to embed fonts in a document. This means you can send an Illustrator file to any machine, on any platform, and it will print correctly even if the fonts are not on the second machine. (You won’t be able to manipulate the document on the second machine if the fonts are missing, though.)

Directly from the PC world, Illustrator 7.0 gives the Mac user the ability to simulate the function of the right-hand mouse button. Hold the Control key C and click on an object, and you get a context-sensitive menu that pops up on the screen, showing commands that apply to the selected object. Given that so many commands have been buried in submenus or have lost their keystrokes, this provides a little bit of relief.

As far as new art-creation features, version 7.0 offers only the Reshape tool, which allows users to transform the overall shape of a path while maintaining its details. This is the closest thing Illustrator has to enveloping, though it takes a lot of work to get your result precisely right. This tool also requires laborious selecting and deselecting of points. (See “Reshaping an Eagle,” on previous page.)

We Need a Little Christmas

Illustrator undoubtedly is one of the best apphcations for creating and editing vector-based graphics, and this upgrade does nothing to change that. Version 7.0 offers an easier entry for people who are coming to Illustrator from Photoshop, and the new cross-platform feature and interface parities are terrific for those who work in a mixed-platform environment. However, longtime lilustrator users will be frustrated with the new interface’s steep relearning curve and its marginal long-term benefits. Also, although the new color and automatic grid features are definitely welcome, we were left thinking, “That’s it?” Not to be greedy, Santa, but as a full-number upgrade, this is a miserly holiday.

Cohen, Sandee. (August 1997). Illustrator 7.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 54-56).

Download Adobe Illustrator 7 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver