Adobe Illustrator CS5

Use powerful creative tools

• Sophisticated vector drawing tools
  Create distinctive designs with precise shape-building tools, fluid and painterly brushes, and advanced path controls.
• Beautiful Strokes
  Fully control variable-width strokes, arrowheads, dashes, and art brush scaling along a path.
• Perspective drawing
  Use perspective grids to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, or 3-point linear perspective, creating the look of realistic depth and distance.
• Bristle Brush
  Paint with vectors that resemble real-world brush strokes. Achieve the expressiveness of natural media with the scalability of vector graphics.
• Gradients and transparency
  Interact with gradients directly on your objects and control the transparency of individual colors in gradients and gradient meshes.
• Blob Brush
  Sketch with a brush that generates a single clean vector shape, even when strokes overlap. Draw naturally, using the Blob Brush tool together with the Eraser and Smooth tools.
• Advanced typography
  Design beautiful text for any media with professional controls for paragraph and character styles, support for OpenType®, transparent effects, and more.
• Resolution-independent effects
  See raster effects such as drop shadows, blurs, and textures maintain their appearance across media. Create work for different types of output and know that raster effects will look the same no matter how your resolution settings change.
• Flexible brushes
  Enjoy improved pressure sensitivity when using a pen and tablet. Add flair to paths, choosing from calligraphic, scatter, art, and pattern brushes. Take advantage of newly subtle controls when making your own custom brushes.
• Brushes with corner control
  Apply art and pattern brushes to a path and get clean results, even at tight bends or corners. Where strokes of different widths join, or they form obtuse or acute angles, choose options to properly fill points where joins occur.
• Live Trace
  Quickly and accurately convert photos, scans, or other bitmap images to editable and scalable vector paths using Live Trace.
• Live Color
  Explore, apply, and control color variations using Live Color, which lets you select any artwork and interactively edit the colors to see results immediately. Use the intuitive Color Guide panel to quickly choose tints, shades, or harmonious color combinations.
• Envelopes and live distortion
  Warp, liquefy, and distort artwork any way imaginable with envelopes and live distortion tools. Easily access envelope options from the Control panel.
• Blend
  Morph one shape into another to create smooth shading, complex contours, and basic animations.
• 3D effects
  Turn 2D shapes into fully editable 3D objects by extruding and revolving paths. Add lighting and wrap images around 3D shapes to easily create objects such as packaging mock-ups, and separate spot colors applied to 3D artwork.
• Clipping masks
  Use clipping masks to hide areas of an object or group, crop placed images, or cut intricate shapes. Quickly find the clipping mask options in the Control panel and work with masks more easily, thanks to new viewing choices for both masks and masked objects.
• Live effects
  Apply live effects without affecting the underlying artwork, so you can edit at any time without starting over.
• Symbol spraying
  Add design elements to your artwork by spraying, scaling, colorizing, and adjusting the transparency of repeated symbols while keeping file sizes small.
• Graphing tools
  Communicate data clearly using powerful tools that make it easy to produce visually compelling charts and graphs, including quickly applying harmonious color groups with Live Color.

Boost productivity

• Shape Builder tool
  Intuitively combine, edit, and fill shapes directly on your artboard without accessing multiple tools and panels.
• Drawing enhancements
  Draw behind elements, disregarding stacking order. Draw or place an image inside an element, instantly creating a clipping mask.
• Multiple artboards for web and interactive
  Define up to 100 working areas in one file. Paste objects in place across artboards for repeating artwork on multiple web pages, screens, or frames.
• In-panel appearance editing
  Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels.
• Symbols
  Make symbols more powerful than ever thanks to new 9-slice scaling and registration point control. Use layers inside symbols to create extremely complex symbols that you can repeat as usual, keeping file sizes small.
• Pixel Preview
  See how your vector artwork will look when rasterized using the Pixel Preview mode. Edit your artwork and the preview changes live — as you work.
• Integration with other Adobe solutions
  Move projects smoothly from design to print or digital output, thanks to tight integration with industry-leading Adobe software such as Adobe Photoshop®, Acrobat®, Flash® Professional, and Digital Editions.
• Industry-standard graphic file formats
  Work with almost any type of graphic file — including PDF, EPS, FXG, Photoshop (PSD), TIFF, GIF, JPEG, SWF, SVG, DWG, DXF, and more.
• New Document Profiles for web and mobile devices
  Access new pixel-grid alignment from web and mobile device profiles, which also include relevant dimensions, color groups, and more.
• Integration with Adobe CS Review
  Create and share online reviews for clients down the hall or around the world using Adobe CS Review, an Adobe CS Live online service.1, 2
• Roundtrip editing with Flash Catalyst
  Edit artwork in Illustrator while maintaining structure and interactivity added using Adobe Flash® Catalyst® software.
• Versatile slicing tools
  Create vector-based slices from objects, groups of objects, or layers that are preserved when exporting your artwork as a SWF or PSD file.
• Refined graphic styles
  Combine styles for unique effects and increased efficiency, and apply styles without disturbing an object’s existing appearance. Enjoy new thumbnail previews and an expanded library of prebuilt styles.
• Practical Smart Guides
  Stay oriented with Smart Guides that are intuitive and practical. Unobtrusive appearance and behaviors don’t clutter your view, such as aligning to objects on the artboard rather than the cursor.
• Photoshop layer comp support
  Control the visibility of layer comps in linked, embedded, or opened Photoshop files from within Illustrator CS5.
• Isolation mode
  Edit objects using Isolation mode, which temporarily sequesters your selection for editing without disturbing other parts of your artwork. Isolate any type of object, including clipping masks, and add new art to a specific place in the stacking order

Deliver virtually anywhere

• Experiment with HTML5
  Try out the latest in HTML5 and CSS3 to more easily design web and device content with the Illustrator HTML5 Pack on Adobe Labs.
• Crisp graphics and text for web, mobile
  Create and align vector objects precisely on the file's pixel grid for clean, sharp raster graphics. Use text anti-aliasing options for individual text frames.
• Resolution-independent effects
  See raster effects such as drop shadows, blurs, and textures maintain their appearance across media. Create work for different types of output and know that raster effects will look the same no matter how your resolution settings change.
• Adobe PDF file creation tools
  Create more secure, multipage, graphic-rich PDF files with Illustrator layers retained. Share files confidently with service providers, including support for PDF/X standards.
• Adobe Device Central
  Design, preview, and test rich graphic content for mobile devices and deliver engaging experiences to billions of subscribers.
• Web and mobile device export
  Easily view, optimize, and export for web and mobile devices, with choices for format, color, quality, compression, and more.
• Separations Preview
  Avoid color output surprises such as unexpected spot colors, unwanted overprinting, overprints that don't overprint, white overprinting, and CMYK blacks in text and placed files.
• DeviceN colorspace
  Place duotone or separated Photoshop images in Illustrator and preserve the file's native color space with DeviceN support. Use multicomponent and Hi-Fi color, raster effects, transparency, and gradient meshes with confidence, knowing that your artwork will separate correctly.
• XML-based FXG support
  Deliver FXG format. The XML-based graphics interchange format for the Adobe Flash® Platform enables designers to deliver more editable, workable content to developers for web, interactive, and RIA projects.
• Support for bleeds
  Quickly set up your artboards for bleeds with the new Bleeds document attribute. You can choose to work with bleeds when you open a new document or add them later in the Document Setup dialog box.
   

Windows

• Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
• Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1; or Windows 7
• 1GB of RAM
• 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot
  install on removable flash storage devices)
• 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card
• DVD-ROM drive
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services and to validate Subscription Edition (if applicable) on an ongoing basis

Mac OS

• Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.5.7, 10.5.8, or v10.6
• 1GB of RAM
• 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot
  install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash storage devices)
• 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card
• DVD-ROM drive
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services and to validate Subscription Edition (if applicable) on an ongoing basis