Besides inserting curly quotes, Illustrator 5.5 replaces triple hyphens with em dashes (doubles, with en dashes), and double spaces after periods with single spaces. You can automatically upgrade punctuation in your document. But this filter took a full half-minute - running on a Power Mac 7100 - to provide access to the 200 fonts in my system. For example, if a document includes Helvetica Black but you don’t have that font installed, you can replace one or more instances of the font with Helvetica Bold. In addition to searching and replacing words, version 5.5 lets you search and replace uses of fonts. All in all, the filter is more hassle than it’s worth. Even if you do the math and figure out exactly how different values will work together, a bug forces row values to inexplicably change when you adjust column values a value may change even if you merely enter the abbreviation pt. This is OK for text, but it’s not OK for grids. Illustrator reduces the height of the gutters to compensate. For example, if you enlarge the height of the rows in the grid. Changing one value in the Rows & Columns dialog box causes at least one other value to change in kind. But this feature was less satisfactory than FreeHand’s regular grid. You can also divide a standard rectangle into rows and columns to create a custom grid. Another irritant is the Preview option, which displays the watch cursor - whether the preview is updating or not. Try the latter and Illustrator changes the shape of your text, even combining two linked text blocks into one. But you can’t insert hairline rules between rows or columns, as in FreeHand, nor can you create rows and columns inside non-rectangular text blocks. As in FreeHand, you select a text block and specify the number of rows and columns, the height and width of the gutters between them, and the order in which the text flows (to the right or down). You can divide a text block into regular rows and columns. And you can create free-form lists by wrapping tabbed text around paths. You can also snap tab stops to ruler increments and move multiple tab stops at the same time. To make alignment easier, Illustrator extends a vertical line from a tab stop as you move it. Illustrator’s tab ruler is a free-floating palette that you can hide or move at will. Every text block gets a large tab rule, and the placement of the ruler is fixed. Although FreeHand 4.0’s support for tabs is comprehensive - including a unique wrapping tab stop that accommodates multiple lines of type per entry - the feature is marred by clumsy implementation. Illustrator 5.5 still lacks FreeHand’s clever page-setup functions, but formatting and text-editing have been enhanced. Illustrator version 5.5 includes improved text-formatting functions, new trapping filters, and support for Adobe Acrobat’s PDF (Portable Document Format). Adobe and Aldus may be in the midst of tying the connubial knot, but Illustrator and FreeHand - the companies’ respective top draw programs - continue to duke it out.
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