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Don't falsely assume, however, that it's all new tricks for the old dog,
here. A few
brand-new features, including the ability to work in the RGB color model, have made their way into version 7.0. Also present are a couple of obvious nods to the World Wide Web's popularity; the ability to create
image-maps, and a 216-color non-dithering swatch library. Another big feature in 7.0 is the Multiple Master palette, which lets you adjust the weight and width of (you guessed it) Adobe's Multiple Master typefaces.
On-screen type now also anti-aliases, unless viewed at an extreme magnification. This means you can now read miniscule type from far off, instead of getting the 'greeking' (x-pattern) text of previous versions.
Speaking of type, Adobe has included 300 Type 1 Postscript Fonts on the disc, including some biggies like the insanely popular Tekton, in Multiple Master format, to boot. Another gift on the CD is the inclusion of the
complete 3 volumes of Gallery Effects Photoshop plug-ins. You'll also find over 300mb of clip art and royalty free stock photography, and a Kudo image browser to view them as a catalog. The standard things are there, as
well, like the Acrobat Reader, Illustrator tutorials, and product tryouts for other Adobe programs. The Bad The bad news is that Illustrator is still no Freehand, and it probably could have done more to bring
itself up to par with CorelDraw for Windows, as well. For instance, the auto-trace tool is still bad; REAL bad. So bad, in fact that it makes you wonder why Adobe doesn't include their own excellent tracing utility,
Streamline. Macromedia gives you xRes, Fontographer, and Extreme 3d for only a few dollars more than you'd pay for Freehand alone, and Freehand already has a great auto-tracer. Put that way, Streamline is more of a
necessity than an application to be purchased on its own, and Adobe should have made it an optional package deal. |
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