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Adobe Illustrator 9.0
Product: Illustrator 9.0 (plus 9.01 and 9.02 updates)
From: Adobe
For: PowerMac with System 8.5+ or Windows 9x/NT/2000
Price: about C$555; upgrades C$204; sidegrades from qualifying graphics titles US$249. (See Adobe’s website for details.)
Pros: True transparency effects, styles palette, improved Flash support. Pixels can now be specified as a global measurement unit for sizing, editing, and laying out artwork. New Opacity masks, Layer Clipping masks and Feathering functions. Overprint preview.
Cons: Selection tools can be confusing. Clipping mask now flattens layered items under some conditions. A few printing/exporting issues (some are solved by the free 9.01 and 9.02 updates).
Strongest Competitors: Macromedia FreeHand 10, CorelDraw 10.
We’ve used Illustrator for more than a decade, dutifully upgrading to each new version as it arrives. There have been bumpy spots along the road (version 7.0 comes to mind), but the program has long been the most reliable vector illustration tool in its class. Hence, we really torture tested Illustrator 9 with a number of complex colour-separation jobs and large-format posters to see if it’s up to the level of reliability established by its workhorse processor, Illustrator 8.
To be honest, we were prepared to be non-plussed by Illustrator 9. Version 8, which seemed to focus primarily on rethinking some of the more egregious interface issues introduced in version 7, seemed a trifle ho-hum and Illustrator 7.0, despite its many advances, was not well liked by many in the Macintosh community who found version 6.0 a more streamlined graphics-production workhorse. But Illustrator 9.0 takes many of the best features of Adobe's competitors and wraps them in Adobe's familiar interface (It also maintains all of the AI8 keyboard shortcuts -- not a single one has changed!) Mix in a few features from Adobe's other titles (especially ImageStyler and Photoshop) and you've got a solid upgrade.
The best thing about Illustrator 9, for us, was the fact that it immediately demonstrated enough tangible benefits to justify an upgrade. Virtually all of the new features in Illustrator 9.0 will seem familiar to users of other Adobe titles (especially Photoshop), as new functions are smoothly integrated into the program.
Consider, for example, the new real-time transparency effects. There is a new tab on the Stroke and gradient dialog, with a slider. Select an object, slide the transparency value to 50 percent and -- bingo! -- the objects beneath it show through. And, unlike previous versions, you can move the now-transparent object at will. It's not a new idea -- Corel has offered "lens" effects like this for years, but it's a vast improvement over the way such effects were handled in previous Illustrator releases.
Another immediately useful change is the new Styles palette. With it, you can apply drop shadows, glows, scribbled outline effects or dozens of other visual effects to any object or text -- and the text remains fully editable, too. It's a no-brainer to use, and greatly enhances the program's creative potential.
There are some new improvements to the Layers functionality of the program that will be useful to Web designers using the program to improve upon the weak drawing and editing tools provided in Macromedia's Flash. Most notably, a new Release Layers to Flash function allows Illustrator to be used to produce morphing-object tweening and animation effects. When exporting graphics to this format, you have the option of exporting the entire graphic to a single Shockwave Flash (SWF) file; exporting each layer to a separate frame in a single SWF file; or exporting each layer to a separate SWF file. However, Illustrator, like Adobe's LiveMotion program, cannot import Flash files. Its FWF support is, at this point, strictly a one-way affair.
Although Macromedia's Flash format is, at this point, the de facto scalable vector graphics standard on the Web (also supported by Corel, via the Flash-compatible R.A.V.E. application bundled with CorelDRAW 10), Illustrator 9.0 also supports the new Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) "standard."
SVG, says Adobe, is an emerging, completely open standard that was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and numerous industry players, including Adobe Systems, IBM, Netscape, Sun, Corel, Hewlett-Packard, and others. The SVG standard provides all the benefits of the Flash format, plus support for the following features: Type 1 and TrueType fonts, extensible markup language (XML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), interactive actions, and dynamic HTML animation. When preparing SVG output, you can assign scripted events to objects using the SVG Interactivity palette, and then export that information with the file. Illustrator ships with an SVG Viewer plug-in, which works with different browsers to play back SVG graphics and Web pages. (It is, of course, this very plug-in that presents the new format's greatest obstacle to acceptance. As noted in Douglas Alder’s column in this issue, the vast majority of personal computers are now able to play Flash files without requiring an additional plug-in download; Adobe has virtually a zero percent market-share with SVG.)
Photoshop users will appreciate the program's new ability to transfer editable text to that program, and Illustrator's CMYK PDF and EPS support (both introduced in version 8) make this program a handy document opener for users of Portable Document Format files.
As we've mentioned in earlier reports, Illustrator has long offered the ability to interpret and open PostScript and EPS documents. This feature, puzzlingly, still doesn't work with 100 percent accuracy (text is sometimes misplaced), but it's better -- and faster -- than that provided by any of its competitors.
A potential trouble spot is the way the program's masking behaviour has changed in this release. Clipping masks, when invoked, now flatten all "top level" layers beneath them when invoked, moving all items onto a single layer. This is definitely a blemish on an otherwise progressive upgrade. Fortunately, masked items clipped by the Object Menu's Clipping Mask function continue to be movable and their outlines, fills and other attributes editable. These items can then be selected and placed back onto unique layers if desired. The mask can also be released at any time, returning the items to their unclipped status. As well, Adobe says that multi-layer masks are possible, as long as the layers in question are not at the top level. Thus, it is possible to define a new top-level layer, and then move all the existing layers into it as sub-layers before invoking the Clipping mask function upon it.
Printing
We discovered a number of issues during our in-depth tests of Illustrator 9.0's ability to generate colour-separated output. In particular, our tests of the program's EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) support and Portable Document Format (PDF) output have not been particularly encouraging.
In our first test, we saved PostScript to disk from QuarkXPress 4 and then imported that into Illustrator 9, using the program's built-in PostScript interpreter. This resulted in a simple sample file consisting of a grayscale bitmapped image, a clipping path and a half-page of text, using two fonts. We exported it in PDF format and then sent this file to a graphics service bureau for output on photographic paper from a PostScript imagesetter. The service bureau's Raster Image Processor (RIP) couldn't handle the file. The device reported an error and wouldn't output the image.
We then re-opened the file in Illustrator 9, saved it as an EPS and distilled this file using Acrobat 4.0. This seemed to work well and the distilling process completed without obvious errors (usually a good sign that the PostScript code is fundamentally sound); we then sent this revised and tested PDF file to the service bureau. The imagesetter successfully printed the revised file, but upon examination of the resulting printout (and, subsequently, the distilled PDF file itself), we discovered that, somewhere during the conversion process of the revised file, the em dashes had disappeared from our page. D'oh!
Worse, this PDF file wouldn't open again properly in Illustrator 9 to allow us to fix these problems, nor could PDFs produced by either method be opened correctly in Illustrator 8.0. When we tried to open the distilled file, it complained of a missing Type 3 font error (which we had none of in our document), and then, when it finally displayed the page, did so with one of the fonts missing entirely!
In our second test, we created a colour page from scratch, assembled from scanned photos, text and boxes created in Illustrator 9 and output it to a Fiery raster image processor (version 4.21) controlling a Xerox Docucolor printer. Again, creating a PDF file by exporting the artwork as PDF resulted in a file that wouldn't print. In this case, however, the RIP read the PDF seemingly without problems, but spit out a completely blank page. Even more disturbingly, the RIP also refused to print a saved-to-disk PostScript file. We were forced to load the PDF file into Photoshop 5.5 (which, thankfully, opened it flawlessly) and save the CMYK file out as a huge, 400-dpi, TIFF and then send this file to the printer. These gigantic files take an enormously long time to process. Although the file did eventually print, we certainly wouldn't want to output every file this way.
Another problem we encountered consistently is the inability of many service bureaus or PostScript printers to successfully interpret the gradients, drop shadows and transparent objects created by the program. There are at least two solutions to the problem: you can rasterize the artwork into a bitmap suitable for printing or, in some cases, invoke a “compatible gradient and gradient mesh printing” function, found in the Document Settings dialog, under Printing and Export.
These issues are exacerbated by the fact that, when saving files in EPS or .AI format, the program may convert fonts to outlines if the file is saved in Illustrator 8.0 or earlier formats. In short, files saved in Illustrator 8 format either lose the ability to edit the text or lose support for transparency. Ironically, Illustrator 9's backward compatibility is sabotaged by the new path and transparency features that are its best new features.
In any case, it appears that Illustrator 9 is suffering from PostScript output problems similar to those which plagued early adopters of the company's InDesign publishing product. We'd flag this as a potential trouble area.
There are other areas that could stand improvement. The program’s inability to choose substitutes for missing fonts when a file is opened is a puzzling weakness – both CorelDRAW and FreeHand provide this capability. And, while we continue to be impressed by the results obtainable with the use of the gradient mesh feature introduced in version 8, the feature remains fairly inscrutable and unimproved, as drag-and-drop fill functions used in virtually all other aspects of the program don't work for no apparent reason on the complex gradient meshes and smoothly blended objects this feature can produce. Still, it's capable of producing great results and was one of Illustrator 8's greatest advances.
Those who think Adobe's fascination with multiple selection tools in Illustrator bordered on the excessive may be concerned over two more such options to bulk up the Illustrator toolbar. A "solid lasso" and a "hollow lasso" allow selections of multiple points. These tools are perhaps not worthy of their own permanent places in the toolbar, considering the many other options there are hidden therein, but the new functions are undeniably useful.
Updated Features
There are always updates that address bugs or limitations in a product that, even at version 9.0, inevitably contains some rough spots. The Illustrator 9.02 patch, released in Dec. 2000, includes:
- Plug-ins for Importing and Exporting that increase compatibility with Photoshop 6.0
- Fix for two issues that caused problems with file save when duplicate brushes were deleted prior to saving.
This update requires Illustrator 9.01. Hence, you may have to apply that patch first.
Conclusion
We’d like to see Illustrator incorporate a multi-function selection tool (something that FreeHand has included since day 1) and a paint-like vector fill tool such as that provided by Macromedia Flash. Heck, even a less clumsy gradient mesh tool or the ability to create text on both the top and bottom paths of a circle at once would be a welcome improvement. (These are all strong points in FreeHand.) However, we would gladly give up these features in favour of more pragmatic concerns. Illustrator’s greatest weakness, in our view, is its surprisingly weak ability to import a PDF file or AI file from another platform without botching up the fonts – yet another task handled with aplomb by FreeHand or CorelDRAW. In short, Illustrator lags behind competitive offering in a number of key areas at this point. Still, FreeHand 10’s lack of true transparency functions ensures Illustrator (and CorelDRAW, which is even better than Illustrator in this regard) of a place in our graphics arts toolkit in the future.
For users of version 8.0 considering whether or not to upgrade or switch, the choice is a little trickier. New features such as the transparency support and Styles palette are compelling reasons to upgrade. However, even though the 9.01 and 9.02 updates address some of the more serious issues that we encountered with Illustrator 9.0, upgraders may encounter a few snags when moving up from the less-capable but "tried and true" Illustrator 8.0. One thing, however, is clear: Adobe has some work to do to catch up with its rivals.
For Further Reading
- Macworld: FreeHand 9: Illustration Program Fantastic At Flash, Fizzles On Features
- The Techno Zone: Adobe Illustrator - Intro
- The Techno Zone: Techniques
- Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/main.html
- MacInTouch: Illustrator 9.0 reader report
- Adobe Illustrator 9.0 to 9.0.1 Update for Windows
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