Illustrator isn’t just a drawing program any more. With major improvements to its text functions, the addition of some new drawing tools, and a complete charting function, Illustrator 3.0 clearly separates itself from its nearest competitors (FreeHand and Canvas).
Hot Type
Illustrator's biggest improvement is in its text handling. You can change fonts, sizes, lending, styles, and colors within any text block on-screen. Tracking, automatic kerning, word and letterspacing, hanging punctuation, auto-I ending, paragraph spacing, horizontal scaling of characters, adjustable superscripts and subscripts Justification, and discretionary hyphenation have all been added to the text controls, and they all work well. Even if the text block is skewed, rotated, or scaled, the cursor creates an insertion point wherever you click, letting you edit your text directly.
You can now enter text in several ways (including importing it from a word processor): in an area block, on an oval or line, and within a polygon. Text can flow from one area block to the next, but there are no tab stops or automatic hyphenation. The lack of tab stops means that when you add bullets to a text field, you must add an adjacent text block that you may have to realign manually when you edit your text.
Creating initial caps — a large capital I at the beginning of a story, for example — is a real problem, because Illustrator does not automatically indent the succeeding lines when the first character is given a negative vertical shift. You can use the new automatic-text-wrap feature to wrap the text around the first character, but to do that, you must first make the initial character an outline, which makes it harder to edit it later. Additionally, if your initial cap is an A or a T, the text block wraps around the letter's legs, which is incorrect. The best way to make an initial cap is to indent the first few lines and create an additional text block for the rest of the story after the initial cap. Your text can then be automatically flowed into place, but this is a clumsy workaround.
Text on a curve works without a hitch and is extremely intuitive. You can have your text run around the outside of an oval or around the inside. You can also enter the text along a line and then move it along the path. Text within a polygon works well in filling a polygon with characters, hut without automatic hyphenation, letters sometimes run into the edges of the polygon you want to fill.
Adobe includes ATM (Adobe Type Manager) in the package and has added the ability to create character outlines instantly, for customizing each character. These characters can become masks for blending colors, or you can cut them apart and manipulate them in ways never dreamed of without an additional program such as Fontographer.
Text can automatically flow around a graphic object, but again, without automatic hyphenation, the word spacing looks awkward. Adobe recommends that you create an additional object beneath the object you want text to flow around, which gives you greater control over individual character positions. In addition, the processes you go through to manipulate text must be followed exactly to get the text to flow around a path or flow from one block to another, and the processes themselves aren't particularly intuitive.
A Bigger Toolbox
Adobe has not changed Illustrator’s drawing tools much, except to add three notable new types: the direct-selection tool, the path-adjustment (scissors) tools, and the charting tool The direct-selection tool lets you select polygons without ungrouping them from other parts. This means that once the an is in place, masked and grouped, you can go into the group and edit its parts. In addition, vou can use all the transformation tools (scale, rotate, flip, and skew) on anchor points selected within these groups.
For longtime users, the direct-selection tool takes some getting used to. When I first started using it, I completely destroyed a grouped piece in minutes. Once I'd gotten the hang of it, though, Ifound it a real pleasure to use and an amazing way to maintain my creative flow rather than worrying about whether I had followed the proper procedures for groups and masks.
Adobe has changed the scissors tool to three path-adjustment tools, which provide much greater control when you edit polygons. The original scissors took which lets you simply add an anchor point to a line, is still there* as is a scissors tool that lets you convert a corner to a curve or a curve to a comer. The third tool lets you completely remove an anchor point (creating a curved line between the next two closest connecting anchor paints, using the direction lines of those two anchor points).
When you click and hold on a tool that has a modifier, the modified tools appear next to the original tool. You can access the direct-selection tool by clicking and holding on the selection tool or by holding the Command key down and pressing the Tab key to toggle between the selection and direct-selection tools.
A duplicate tool, which does the same thing as pressing the Option key, lists been added to each of the transformation tools, and a draw-from-center option, which does the same thing as pressing the Shift key, has been added to the oval and rectangle tools. Illustrator has always used modifier keys, and because pressing a modifier key is easier and faster than selecting a palette tool, I have no idea why Adobe added these tools.
Illustrator 3.0 lets you select a line segment and move it — regardless of whether you’ve selected an anchor point or not. However, I find it more intuitive to modify only those lines that have a selected anchor point.
Charting the Course
Illustrator's new charting tool is powerful and easy to use. Simply select the tool and click on and drag an area, and a dialog box appears, asking you to fill it with numbers. When you've entered the data (you can also import data from a spreadsheet), Illustrator recreates your chart. The chart types include bar, stacked-bar, pie, seatterplot, area, and line charts. (I would use this tool for the charts in MacUser, but creating a horizontal bar chart requires an incredibly crude workaround that's more trouble than it's worth.) The idea of having a drawing program with all the power of Illustrator providing a database link is positively ingenious.
Artists can add an infinite number of creative effects to bar charts by creating an art object and designating it as a chart unit (the USA Today look). The program automatically scales the art object appropriately. You can incorporate patterns into area charts, control the colors used in line and scatterplot charts, and more.
Designer Commands
Adobe has changed Illustrator's commands to better suit designers. The Move dialog box, for example, now resides on the Edit menu instead of being hidden under the selection tool. You can now convert graphic objects into guides or drag guides from the rulers for alignment (but objects do not snap to the alignment guides — only the cursor does — so you need to select objects carefully).
You can now complete punch-outs (the ability to see through a “donut hole”) by selecting the art objects and choosing Make Compound from the Paint menu. Because a compound graphic automatically becomes a grouped object, the direct-selection tool is very helpful and makes modifying the compound, as well as any other groups, easy.
Rather than waiting for a complete screen redraw to preview the entire screen, you can now preview just selected items, and you can undo your last command after previewing. A new Apply button in the Paint dialog box lets you view an effect in the Preview mode without clicking on OK (and maybe having to undo the action).
You can now view placed images in gray scale or color, and the split-path tolerance has been changed to either on or off. You can develop and save a user-preferences file that makes specific fonts, patterns, custom colors, and graph designs immediately available on launch. The printing scheme has been changed so that the active page is page 1 (not page 5), but tiled pages are still available. Adobe has opted to keep the drawing area limited to 16 x 16 inches, even though many artists find it restricting.
The manual is well written, and the package also includes a quick-reference card, a gallery disk and color guide, ATM, DrawOver, and Separator.
The Bottom Line
Illustrator 3.0 successfully tackles its predecessor's creative and technical limitations while adding exceptional features. Although it lets you create full-page documents, it does not offer the text- formatting accuracy of QuarkXPress or Aldus PageMaker.
FreeHand may have greater layering and color control and, until now, better control over text, but Illustrator’s vastly improved text-handling, charting, and direct-selection tool plus bundled extras (ATM, DrawOver, and Separator) make it the best drawing program currently available.
Clark, K. Daniel. (January 1991). Illustrator. MacUser. (pgs. 50-51).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (2 votes)
420 / 
2014-04-14 / 
2023-05-22 / 
ccb30ab9b484f311c5f9fa4bd4447ad868640f2c / 
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illustrator_301.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
