Adobe Illustrator 5.5 - Macintosh Repository (2024)

Adobe and Aldus may be in the midst of tying the connubial knot, but Illustrator and FreeHand — the companies’ respective top draw programs — continue to duke it out. Illustrator version 5.5 includes improved text-formatting functions, new trapping filters, and support for Adobe Acrobat’s PDF (Portable Document Format). The program is also native Power Mac.

Deep into Text Territory

Illustrator 5.5 still lacks FreeHand’s clever page-setup functions, but formatting and text-editing have been enhanced. Take tabs, for example. Although FreeHand 4.0’s support for tabs is comprehensive — including a unique wrapping tab stop that accommodates multiple lines of type per entry — the feature is marred by clumsy implementation. Every text block gets a large tab rule, and the placement of the ruler is fixed. By contrast. Illustrator’s tab ruler is a free-floating palette that you can hide or move at will. To make alignment easier, Illustrator extends a vertical line from a tab stop as you move it. You can also snap tab stops to ruler increments and move multiple tab stops at the same time. And you can create free-form lists by wrapping tabbed text around paths.

You can divide a text block into regular rows and columns. As in FreeHand, you select a text block and specify the number of rows and columns, the height and width of the gutters between them, and the order in which the text flows (to the right or down). But you can’t insert hairline rules between rows or columns, as in FreeHand, nor can you create rows and columns inside non-rectangular text blocks. Try the latter and Illustrator changes the shape of your text, even combining two linked text blocks into one. Another irritant is the Preview option, which displays the watch cursor — whether the preview is updating or not.

You can also divide a standard rectangle into rows and columns to create a custom grid. But this feature was less satisfactory than FreeHand’s regular grid. Changing one value in the Rows & Columns dialog box causes at least one other value to change in kind. For example, if you enlarge the height of the rows in the grid. Illustrator reduces the height of the gutters to compensate. This is OK for text, but it’s not OK for grids. Even if you do the math and figure out exactly how different values will work together, a bug forces row values to inexplicably change when you adjust column values; a value may change even if you merely enter the abbreviation pt. All in all, the filter is more hassle than it’s worth.

In addition to searching and replacing words, version 5.5 lets you search and replace uses of fonts. For example, if a document includes Helvetica Black but you don’t have that font installed, you can replace one or more instances of the font with Helvetica Bold. But this filter took a full half-minute — running on a Power Mac 7100 — to provide access to the 200 fonts in my system.

You can automatically upgrade punctuation in your document. Besides inserting curly quotes, Illustrator 5.5 replaces triple hyphens with em dashes (doubles, with en dashes), and double spaces after periods with single spaces. Illustrator can replace strings of characters with single ligature and fraction characters included separately in Adobe Expert Collection fonts. Illustrator 5.5 also includes filters that check the spelling in your document and change the case of selected text.

Illustrator Looks Outward

Illustrator still wouldn’t know a TIFF image if it came with a resume and pedigree, but the program now imports PICT objects, such as Canvas drawings and Microsoft Excel charts. This enhancement pales, however, next to Illustrator 5.5’s support for Acrobat PDF files. The Illustrator 5.5 package bundles both Acrobat Distiller and the PDF Writer driver, both of which can convert a document to a PDF file. If all printer fonts and images are available during PDF conversion. Illustrator is able to edit the text and graphic objects in the file.

Does it work? The process isn’t foolproof, but it works surprisingly well. After printing a five-page Aldus PageMaker document to disk, I converted it to a PDF file using Distiller and opened it inside Illustrator 5.5. A dialog box let me browse the pages in the document, view thumbnail previews, and select and open a page. (Illustrator treats every page as a separate document.) I could access objects inside an EPS illustration that I had created in Illustrator 3.0 and imported into PageMaker. However, rather than interpreting text in continuous blocks, Illustrator treated each line of type as independent and even broke some lines into multiple objects. These breaks seemed to occur at points where I had kerned the text. This made editing tricky, but not a single letter was lost.

Printing and Pace

Illustrator 5.5 makes a respectable attempt at automated trapping. (FreeHand 3.0 let you assign spreads to all objects uniformly, but that was dropped from version 4.0.) A Pathfinder filter allows you to select an object set against a different color background, specify the thickness of the trap, and even vary the proportions of the trap according to height and width. Illustrator then generates a new composite path filled with a mix of the colors from the background and foreground objects. However, you can’t apply the filter to gradations, strokes, or placed images.

Illustrator’s other printing improvements are equally practical. If you’ve had problems printing gradations to older PostScript Level 1 devices, you can select an option that describes gradations as object blends, much like those you get when saving a document to the Illustrator 3.0 format. This can dramatically slow the printing speed, but it beats buying a new printer. Illustrator 5.5 also provides new filters that let you control the overprinting of black ink, generate reports listing the fonts and imported images in a document, and change the halftone settings for an illustration. But you can’t change the halftone settings for a single object as you can in FreeHand.

Predictably, Illustrator 5.5 runs two to three times as fast on a Power Mac as its predecessor does on a 680X0 machine. Documents with lots of text take a long time to redraw because of Illustrator’s reliance on Adobe Type Manager. ATM 3.8, a native Power Mac version, will display text three to five times as fast.

Illustrator 5.5 performed slower than FreeHand in all but one Macworld Lab test; in one test, version 5.5 running on a Power Mac was slower than Illustrator 5.0 running on a Centris 650. Part of Illustrator’s slowness was a function of our test files. Version 5.5 calculates bounding boxes more accurately than its predecessor, thereby preventing exported EPS files from clipping off thick strokes and mitered corners, but this takes lots more time. Since the majority of the objects in our drawing test file were stroked, Illustrator devoted a huge percentage of its redraw time to calculating bounding boxes, even in the artwork mode. If you rely mostly on unstroked objects, your illustrations will redraw more quickly.

But even taking into account the slight speed disappointments. Illustrator 5.5 is a bargain. For only $99 to registered 5.0 users — that’s less than the $129 upgrade fee for the Power Mac version of FreeHand, which includes no new features — the Illustrator 5.5 package includes more than 200 tile patterns, 220 fonts, and the Acrobat Distiller and Exchange utilities. I for one wouldn’t hesitate to upgrade.