Illustrator 9 .0
The industry-standard vector graphics creation software for print and the Web
Adobe® Illustrator® 9.0 expands your creative freedom and enhances your productivity with its new Web graphics tools, versatile transparency capabilities, powerful object and layer effects, and other innovative features. Now you can use these fast, flexible tools to transform your creative ideas into sophisticated graphics for use on the Web, in print, or in dynamic media projects.
With Adobe® Illustrator® 9.0, you can preserve your artwork in vector form when exporting it for the Web. Illustrator 9.0 provides excellent support for exporting files to Flash (SWF) format, as well as to the new Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard. Both Web vector formats maintain high-quality artwork and fonts, while producing smaller file sizes and faster download times than bitmap formats. Flash is widely used to design vector-based Web pages and Web animations; when exporting graphics to this format, you have the option of exporting the entire graphic to a single SWF file; exporting each layer to a separate frame in a single SWF file; or exporting each layer to a separate SWF file.
SVG 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 also ships with the SVG Viewer plug-in, which works with different browsers to play back SVG graphics and Web pages.
Because the vector artwork that you create in Illustrator will be rasterized upon output to the Web, it's useful to monitor your work in terms of pixels. Illustrator 9.0 lets you specify pixels as a global measurement unit for sizing, editing, and laying out your artwork. You can also preview your vector objects as they will appear when rasterized in a Web browser. Working in Pixel Preview mode guarantees that your objects will snap to the nearest pixel edge in order to minimize anti-aliasing. You can draw and edit artwork in this mode.
New commands under the Effect menu let you convert type and graphic objects to editable rectangular or elliptical shapes, which can be especially useful for creating Web buttons. These shapes can contain fully editable type objects and appearances; when you modify or transform a shape, its contents update automatically.
The Stylize commands under the Effect menu let you apply appearances such as drop shadows and glows directly to type and graphic objects while retaining full vector editability of the objects.
The new Release to Layers command lets you instantly distribute all of the objects on a layer onto separate, individual layers. You can use this feature to prepare files for further Web animation work in other applications that support layers. For example, you can prepare different frames of an animation by first applying blend options to objects or using the scatter brush to paint repeated copies of an object along a path. You can then release each object in the blend or scattered path to a separate layer, and export the file as a Flash (SWF) file or to Adobe Photoshop® 5.5 to set up the animation.
By pressing Shift as you choose the Release to Layers command, you can distribute objects onto separate layers in a cumulative sequence. For example, you can create a layer containing the first object, a layer containing the first and second objects, a layer containing the first, second, and third objects, and so on. This procedure is especially useful for building animation sequences.
The new Transparency palette lets you apply transparency to any graphic object, bitmap image, or type character in your artwork so that underlying objects are partially or fully revealed. You can vary the transparency settings for every character, word, or paragraph in a text block, and even create cumulative effects by applying individual settings to characters and then applying an overall setting to an entire text block. Objects and text remain fully editable with transparency applied.
You also have the option of limiting transparency to a layer, to a group of objects, or to an object’s stroke or fill to achieve different creative results. To apply transparency to multiple objects, simply Shift-click to select the objects and then set the transparency. To apply transparency to a layer, first target the layer in the Layers palette and then set the transparency. The transparency setting then affects the entire layer as a single object - any graphics on the layer, and any you add later on, immediately assume the transparency of the layer.
Two new masking features - Opacity masks and Layer Clipping masks - let you selectively hide and reveal areas of your artwork through custom shapes. Using the Transparency palette, you can define any object as an opacity mask, so that artwork attached to the mask takes on modified transparency. The grayscale equivalents of the colors in the mask correspond to different levels of mask transparency. By editing the shape, placement, and fill of the mask, you can achieve sophisticated effects such as variable transparency across an object.
Clipping masks, which are defined through the Layers palette, let you reveal a set of underlying objects through a clipping shape.
