Datasheet

Adobe Illustrator CS3 What’s New 5
Drawing tools and controls
e drawing tools in Illustrator have long been the industry standard for power and
versatility, with an amazing depth of choice for path manipulation and object design. But
drawing needs to be faster and more natural as the pressure to produce more work in less
time increases. And powerful options are of no use if you can’t nd them. Now, the best
vector tool has just gotten better, with the following improvements designed to make your
life a little bit easier.
Point selection
Sometimes it’s the simple things that make all
the dierence. Using the Direct Selection tool
in Illustrator CS3, you can run your cursor
over any anchor point and cause it to enlarge
so you can easily see and select it. Even with no
objects selected, in Preview or Outline mode,
your cursor will show a larger square anywhere
it detects a point. You can also set preferences
for selection tolerance and anchor display.
Path editing
Fine-tune faster with all your path-editing
tools displayed in the Control panel. As soon
as you select points using the Direct Selection
tool, the Control panel shows the tools to
delete and add points, cut and join paths, or
convert anchors to smooth or corner. You can
even hide and show handles with one click.
Point alignment
Have you always wanted to be able to align
and distribute points just like you align and
distribute objects? Now you can. Select more
than one point using the Direct Selection tool,
and the entire range of familiar alignment buttons will appear in the
Control panel. You can even align points to the artboard or to a crop area.
Operating performance
e underlying architecture of Illustrator has been improved so you can now work more
uidly, without waiting for the application to catch up with your hands and your thoughts.
You can now scroll and zoom with increased speed, and you’ll notice snappier refresh rates
and responsiveness while working with complex artwork. If you’re using multiple CPUs,
you’ll experience even greater performance gain due to multithreading advances made in
Illustrator CS3.
See layer selection edge colors
The Layers panel now shows small stripes
that indicate the colors of your selection
edges. No clicking is required to see a
layer’s assigned color.
Select and position
anchor points with
new visual cues and
nd path-editing tools
in the Control panel.