Thread: Adobe Creative Suite 4

Now is the time to check two other equally important tools in this suite, Illustrator and Acrobat 9 Pro. Before we continue, it would be worth mentioning that CS4 is optimized for 64-bit operating systems and so it provides high editing speed, quick switching amongst applications and faster rendering.

Just to remind you, it is a vector based drawing application that is meant for graphic and web designers. Its new and improved interface allows you to open multiple Illustrator files in a single window. Each file is shown as a tab with the filename as the name of the tab. For reducing the time to open a tab again and again, you can now just click the tab which opens the desired file. CS4 allows you to create multiple pages or artboards in a single window. By default all artboards are of the same size and equally positioned within the window. But, the suite provides great deal of flexibility to change the size and position of individual artboards, and even allows you to overlap different artboards.



The designer can see the same job created on different page sizes in a singe window and a maximum of 100 artboards can place in a single window. Illustrator CS4 had a new brush tool called 'Blob Brush Tool,' which represents a new way to paint an illustration. Painting with this brush gives an already filled object rather than creating a new path with brush strokes applied to them. Illustrator gives the outline filled objects which can be edited later. Any new shape painted with the same color and stroke will automatically merge with existing shapes, with the same settings, and it pick up style attributes from other objects.

One of the commonly used 'Gradient' tool has seen a pretty useful upgrade with this version. Earlier, when drawing a rectangle. one used to click on the rectangle object and then on the Gradient menu to draw a gradient color.