Operation Manual

1
Last updated 11/8/2011
Chapter 1: What’s New
Adobe Illustrator CS5 provides precision and power with sophisticated drawing tools, expressive lifelike brushes, a
host of time-savers, and integration with Adobe CS Live* online services.
Perspective drawing, a Bristle brush, variable width strokes, and the Shape Builder tool are among the new features in
Illustrator’s vector-graphics environment.
With enhanced integration among Adobe products, you can easily move between Illustrator CS5 and products such
as Adobe Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 where you can add interaction to your designs.
Note: This page provides a list of features in Illustrator CS5.5 and Illustrator CS5. This page does NOT tell you how to
use these features. For more information about any of the new features, click the corresponding links provided.
Perspective drawing
The new Perspective Grid tool allows you to turn on a grid that supports drawing directly on planes of true perspective.
Use the perspective grid to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1, 2, or 3-point perspectives. The new Perspective
Selection tool allows you to move, scale, duplicate, and transform objects dynamically. You can also move objects
perpendicular to its current location using the Perspective Selection tool.
Imagine being able to easily add a series of street lamps to a city scape for a sequential lighting animation, or fence posts
to a reference landscape scene to complete your billboard for a western wilderness outpost. With the Perspective Grid
tool group, you quickly and easily work in a preset perspective. The perspective grid provides grid presets to manage
the viewing angle and viewing distance for the scene along with widgets to control vanishing points, horizon height,
ground level, and the origin. You can also use the perspective grid to draw vector objects on top of a reference
photograph or video still placed on your artboard.
See “Perspective drawing” on page 81.
Beautiful strokes
Illustrator CS5 provides several new features that enhance the capability to design with strokes.
Variable-width strokes
Use the Width tool to draw strokes with variable widths that you can quickly and smoothly adjust at any point,
symmetrically or along either side. You can also create and save custom width profiles, which you can reapply to any
stroke.
See “Create strokes with variable widths” on page 160.
Dashed line adjustments
New options in the Stroke panel allow you to control the alignment of dashes. You can choose to align dashed strokes
symmetrically around corners and at the end of open paths or preserve the dash and gaps in strokes.
See “Create dotted or dashed lines” on page 155.