Illustrator CS: a first look

Adobe packs this version of Illustrator with a ton of long-needed features, including the ability to create reusable templates; 3D effects such as extrusion, rotation, surfaces of revolution and texture mapping; character and paragraph styles; and more sophisticated OpenType support. In fact, the program now incorporates InDesign's much-lauded type engine, which supplies typographic niceties such as automatic ligatures, optical kerning and optical margin alignment, as well as full Unicode support.

However, from what we've seen, the Glyphs palette seems ill-suited to the task of navigating huge, professional Unicode font sets.

Existing users will probably want the £163.33 (inc. VAT) upgrade when the software ships at the end of the year, but the £511.13 (inc. VAT) full-copy price seems too expensive.

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