{"id":16360,"date":"2010-05-04T11:56:50","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T11:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2010\/05\/illustrator-cs5-has-excellent-pixel-chops-at-last.html"},"modified":"2010-05-04T11:56:50","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T11:56:50","slug":"illustrator_cs5_has_excellent_pixel_chops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/04\/illustrator_cs5_has_excellent_pixel_chops\/","title":{"rendered":"Illustrator CS5 has excellent pixel chops (at last)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I started working at Adobe nearly 10 years ago, I got up in the Illustrator PM&#8217;s face. AI9 had just implemented Pixel Preview mode for Web and screen designers, but the feature was maddeningly incomplete.  I made my point forcefully, and over the years Illustrator has made improvements (e.g. enabling inside\/outside\/center placement of strokes), but the job just wasn&#8217;t done.<br \/>\nUntil now.<br \/>\nYou can now set up a document so that all art automatically snaps to pixel boundaries, meaning that, for example, 1-pixel black strokes will remain 1 pixel in width instead of looking like blurry 2-pixel gray strokes.  You can also snap objects selectively to the grid, and you can choose among anti-aliasing options on text. See the <a href=\"http:\/\/help.adobe.com\/en_US\/illustrator\/cs\/using\/WSf01dbd23413dda0e1e23acb6124476da654-7fea.html\">Illustrator help docs<\/a> for more info, or better yet, watch this three-minute video:<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"425\" height=\"256\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/images.tv.adobe.com\/swf\/player.swf\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"><\/param><param name=\"FlashVars\" value=\"fileID=6013&#038;context=433&#038;embeded=true&#038;environment=production\"><\/param><embed src=\"http:\/\/images.tv.adobe.com\/swf\/player.swf\" flashvars=\"fileID=6013&#038;context=433&#038;embeded=true&#038;environment=production\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"425\" height=\"256\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<p>But don&#8217;t take my (or Mordy&#8217;s) word for it.  Recently the noted Web designer Jon Hicks (creator of the <a href=\"http:\/\/hicksdesign.co.uk\/journal\/branding-firefox\">Firefox logo<\/a>, among other things) was <a href=\"http:\/\/hicksdesign.co.uk\/journal\/fireworks-alternatives-on-trial-acorn-drawit-and-opacity\">unhappy<\/a> with Illustrator for Web work.  What a difference a month &amp; a version make:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>March 22: &#8220;Illustrator [CS4] in particular irritated the hell out of me with it&#8217;s pixel preview artefacts.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>April 30: After trying Illustrator CS5, &#8220;I&#8217;m rather smitten with it&#8230; Having pixels work properly in Illustrator is fantastic.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I started working at Adobe nearly 10 years ago, I got up in the Illustrator PM&#8217;s face. AI9 had just implemented Pixel Preview mode for Web and screen designers, but the feature was maddeningly incomplete. I made my point forcefully, and over the years Illustrator has made improvements (e.g. enabling inside\/outside\/center placement of strokes), [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16360"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}