RSS FeedHow to Use Adobe Illustrator integrated with the other CS4 Software
Copyright (c) 2010 Mandi Pralle
As wonderful a tool as Illustrator is, the entire Creative
Suite of products shows that it's just one in an entire,
complete tool kit. We're going to go through broad
integration between Adobe Illustrator, and its suite mates
in the Design Package - InDesign, Photoshop, Flash,
Dreamweaver and Acrobat.
Each of these programs was developed independently to
handle specific job tasks that a print and multimedia
design house might encounter. Two of the applications
(Dreamweaver and Flash) were acquired by Adobe when it
acquired Macromedia Software in 2005. Each does something
a bit different; Illustrator is good for line drawings on a
canvas of arbitrary size, Photoshop is good for photo
manipulation and 'pixel painting', Flash and Dreamweaver
are used to make interactive animations and web sites, and
InDesign is designed to assemble and lay out books, while
Acrobat performs a similar function for smaller, multi-page
PDFs.
What makes these software packages inter-operate is that
the majority of them (other than Dreamweaver and Photoshop)
are all built off of, essentially, the same file format:
Postscript. Postscript files are text files with
additional information describing the mathematics needed to
raw curves, splines, lines and fill information. The
reference definition of Postscript is what underlies every
laser printer and most ink jet printers out there, and is
also what drives the Macintosh screen display. Adobe
originally developed Postscript and has several extensions
on it defining how it works.
Macromedia software also developed extensions on the
language, and those got rolled into Shockwave and Flash
file formats.
When using these software tools together, one of the things
you'll notice is that all of them can import one another's
formats - Illustrator can import...