What is New in Illustrator CS5 ? (part 2)

7. Artboard Rulers

Each Artboard now has its own ruler, in addition to a global document ruler, which allows for adjustments based on the active artboard (selected in the Artboards panel).

8. Gradient Mesh Point Transparency

Individual points in a gradient mesh can now have opacity settings, just like their regular gradient counterparts. This is a huge enhancement to gradient mesh, which previously had limited functionality and required significant workarounds to achieve similar results.

9. Shape Builder Tool

The Shape Builder tool is Live Paint designed to be more user friendly for coloring portions of overlapping paths. While Live Paint required you to jump through hoops to achieve the desired effects, the Shape Builder tool provides a much more straightforward click method to quickly colorize or erase areas.

10. Symbol Enhancements

Symbols have had various enhancements in order to make them more useable and also to make them easier to use with Adobe Flash. New enhancements include better snapping, a built-in registration point, layer support within symbols, and nine-slice scaling.

11. Flash XML Graphics

Illustrator now supports filters, text, gradients, and blend elements for FXG, allowing files to be more easily interchanged among Flash, Illustrator, Fireworks, and Photoshop.

12. Align to Pixel Grid

While Illustrator has had the ability to view the pixel version of the current document for several versions, it was a manual and time-consuming process to adjust artwork and text to avoid unwanted jaggies and blurred edges. This new feature, shown as a check box at the bottom of the Transform panel in Figure 8, automatically aligns artwork so that both jaggies and blurred edges are minimized.

Figure 8. The Align to Pixel Grid check box in the Transform panel protects your art against the jaggies and blurries.

13. Resolution-Independent Effects

In another fix more than an enhancement, Illustrator now keeps the appearance of raster effects on artwork when you change the Document Raster Effects settings. In the past, for example, Drop Shadows would change size when the Document Raster Effects Settings resolution was changed. Now Illustrator does the math for you and keeps the appearance consistent regardless of the resolution setting.