• Crop Area Tool – now provides a working environment that includes dimensions and units tailored to your output. For print, the web, video, and film, predefined Crop Area characteristics set up your workspace so that it automatically efficient for the type of media that will display your designs.
• Isolation Mode – will become an essential method for working with complex artwork. It is for designers who spend a lot of time grouping, hiding, locking, and endlessly re-stacking layers to access objects for editing while protecting areas that need to remain untouched. All objects in any group respond to Isolation mode, as do Live Paint groups.
• Symbols – have been enhanced for ease of use and better integration with Flash. They now have options to define a symbol type as a movie clip or graphic symbol.
Illustrator CS3 is a much faster and very solid release. The Live Color enhancement is extremely powerful, although, unlike other new features it is not just a tool, but something that is built into the entire system, and works throughout the system. I don't think there is anything that you cannot do with color in Illustrator CS3. This one feature is worth the upgrade.
One also has to realize that this new version of Illustrator CS3 is more of a transitional version as well. First it upgrades to the new Intel Macs, and then to the rest of the Creative Suite series as well; especially to Flash CS3. It would have been nice if there had been some 3D features added to this version as there had been with Photoshop CS3, but all in all I think that this version of Illustrator is worth the price.
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