Adobe Illustrator CS2 12

Adobe Illustrator CS2 finally obliges with support for saving palette arrangements (though not menus or shortcuts) as named workspaces. Much more significant is the introduction - at last - of a context-sensitive Control Palette. It's difficult to overstate what a difference this makes. Previously just the basic setting up of an object involved multiple trips to a whole host of palettes - Colour, Swatches, Stroke, Transparency and so on. Now simply work your way along the Control Palette setting fill and stroke colour, outline width, brush style, opacity, graphic style, position and size. Even better, you can click on the names of many of the Illustrator parameters and the relevant palette opens up immediately below offering finer control. Adobe says that the Control Palette offers direct access to 80% of Illustrator CS2's power and that seems about right. It's even possible to work with all other palettes hidden which makes a very welcome change. In terms of new Illustrator power Adobe is making much of two innovations, the first of which is its Live Trace capability. Previously Illustrator offered a basic AutoTrace tool for creating a single shape at a time, now it has fully integrated the powerful raster-to-vector conversion power of its standalone Streamline application. Place a bitmap and hit the new Live Trace command and a few seconds later the entire bitmap image is replaced by an astonishingly high quality vector equivalent. Because the link to the original bitmap is maintained the tracing is "live" which means that if you resize or externally edit the source, or change settings, it will automatically update. Using the Control Palette dropdown you can select from 13 presets ranging from Comic Art through to High Fidelity Photo, Technical Drawing to Hand Drawn Sketch. Alternatively CS2 lets call up the Tracing Options dialog to take more control over advanced settings such as path fitting and minimum area, and preview the effect as you make your changes.