Adobe Creative Suite 4

Last month we discussed some of the exciting new features in Photoshop and
InDesign. 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.

Illustrator CS4

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. Now, it
shows a panel or a line inside the rectangle, called 'interactive gradient
editor' panel. Like the earlier versions, there is no need to open the
'Gradient' window every time, to apply any changes. The designer can work
directly on his work because the 'panel' is on top. Click on the panel and drag
it anywhere or stretch and rotate it. Also it's possible to move the gradient
stops, change the color and adjust the opacity directly on the image. This tool
enhancement gives a new way to paint in illustration and reduce the time to open
the gradient window every time.

Acrobat 9 Pro

This is one of the most popular software to send magazine articles, news,
fillable forms, etc through mail. These docs can be published on the Web pages
without any loss of information or style. The latest version, Adobe Acrobat 9
Pro comes packed with a lot of new features and creates PDFs more precisely. It
helps business professionals to communicate and collaborate more effectively and
securely with virtually anyone. This version can combine different types of
files into a professional PDF portfolio and maintain the original layers and
meta data.

Open Acrobat 9 Pro and go to File >Create PDF >from Web Page or Advance >Web Capture >Create PDF from Web page to open a new URL. Give the URL address and select the number of levels, to start PDF creation. Higher the levels, the more the time taken to create a PDF. You can also play multimedia files from the Web page.

Web capture capability has improved a great deal, which allows users to save
the entire Web page or some of its parts. The latest version supports audio,
video and animation inside the PDF. Anyone can see the multimedia content on a
PDF file. They can open a PDF file like a web page and click on the multimedia
item to play, start the embedded Flash movies, without any media player
application like Windows or VLC Media Players.

The PDF files are clear and sharper than before because the new version
supports the scanners and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. While
scanning, earlier versions of Acrobat, created only an image of that page, there
was no provision to change the text. Acrobat 9 Pro allows a scan of an image
containing text and creates a PDF, where text is editable. Acrobat 9, converts
the image of the document into actual text using OCR. This technology eases the
task of searching the desired sentence or words. The same way, it is easy to
convert a PDF file to Microsoft Word format with font, layout and tables. The
new Form Wizard converts Microsoft Word or Excel documents into PDF forms very.
These PDF forms can be sent to other people to fill the details electronically
using Adobe Reader. The Form Wizard creates forms from paper or electronic
documents. The Form Tracker will monitor, how many people completed the form and
collect data electronically. After all the forms have been completed,

you easily export the collected data to a spreadsheet for future reference.

Bottomline: Some useful time saving features such as the ability to
compare multiple pages in a window and view multimedia files in PDF, without
media player support, make it worth a buy.