Adobe's vector drawing program gets a slew of new features. (Adobe Illustrator 9)

Member Name: johnpaul

Product:	Adobe Illustrator 9
Date:	18/07/00 (390 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great new features, and finally, transparency!

Disadvantages: Large Ram allocation, slower and fatter.

For quite a while it seemed Macromedia was gaining a lead in many areas that Adobe used to comfortably be the leader in. Freehand among them. With it's last version it introduced many new features to it's box of tricks that left Adobe's Illustrator 8 looking a little lacklustre.

However, Adobe seemed to be happy providing a sturdy vector drawing package, that provided reliable postscript performance in an enviroment that felt comfortable to any Photoshop user.

With Illustrator 9, Adobe have finally put transparency well and truely into the picture. It's not here just as some 'lens'. Any layer or object can become transparent, or be applyed Photoshop-style blending modes, such as Screen, Multiply, etc. so that layer interacts with any objects below it.

New to the palletes is an 'Appearance' pallete, where you can keep track of the many 'live' effects you can apply to an object. Among these are drop shadows, and 'styles' where specific fills and line effects can be saved and applyed to any object.

There are a new selection of Web orientated features, such as setting image maps and urls to objects, and 'pixel preview' where Illustrator with simulate screen resolution, and you can clear up any bad furs you would otherwise get on the rasterised edges of objects and lines.

The layer pallette now shows photoshop style thumbnail previews of each layer, a god-send, if like me, you can neglect to name layers for an hour or so.
If you click on the inward arrow of a layer, it will point down and actually show all the sublayers as layers below the parent layer. No more guesswork to how many times you're going to have to hit the 'send back' buttons.

AI 9 will export layers to photoshop, as with 8, but will also export a text layer as editable text to Photoshop.

Safe to say, if you spend a lot of time with Illustrator, you will find all the new fea
tures very useful (too many to list here), and may even help your workflow - but be warned, there is a pay-off: Ram.

Illustrator 9's prefered memory allocation, on a Mac, is 40MB. -Ouch- Don't even think of running it on less than this, I've found it behaves peculiary when a few documents are open even with this allocation, AND it seems to run slower with all that new code loaded in.
I've almost found myself wishing I was back with the comparatively slim and sprightly AI8, but now can't turn my back on 9.
Just make sure you've invested in that fat memory module you've been meaning to, before you invest in this.

Summary: