Should we tell Adobe how bad the Illustrator UI is for drawing with beziers?

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  • Mike Henden
    Mike Henden Posts: 5
    edited October 2022
    Another piece of irony, the Bezier curves tool in Adobe Photoshop actually works better than the Bezier curves tool in Illustrator. Why is that?
  • Mike Henden
    Mike Henden Posts: 5
    edited October 2022
    In fact I'm sure I never said that... :*
    Vasil Stanev said:
    Mike Henden said:
    the good old days
  • Cory Maylett
    Cory Maylett Posts: 248
    edited October 2022
    I worked as a designer and design director at a daily newspaper from the mid-'80s until around 2000. During the early days of desktop publishing, I worked equally with MacDraw, Aldus Freehand, and Adobe Illustrator from the first versions of each. I used them all because each wire service supplied various maps and graphics to newspapers created in its preferred tool.

    MacDraw, of course, was primitive and terrible. However, I wouldn't call Freehand in either its Aldus or Macromedia iterations superior to Illustrator. I'm afraid I have to disagree with statements that one was superior to the other when each had its strengths and weaknesses. Which was better was mainly one of personal preference. I preferred Illustrator, but I can also understand why others favored FreeHand.

    That said, in recent years, Illustrator has become so bloated with additional features and an increasingly buggy GUI that I don't find it pleasurable to use any longer, even though I use it every day.

    The Macintosh fill bug on all sharp angles at high enlargement I've circled below drove me nuts for the last couple of years, but Adobe seems to have finally fixed it in one of the more recent updates. Now, I'd be happy if they would fix the 20 or 30 other things driving me nuts.

    Perhaps, as others have stated, I've become used to the straightforward, unadorned accuracy of the drawing tools in Glyphs and FontLab.


  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 297
    edited October 2022
    I think the last time I paid for and actually used Illustrator was sometime before Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel. I bought a used G4 right about when Apple started selling G5s.
    For all-purpose vector drawing about on par with CorelDRAW, the latest version of Inkscape is my daily driver and has been for at least ten years. My only complaints are its lack of better H&J for justified text flows, and its still a bit clunky OpenType features interface. I run it in Windows. The developers took forever to release a version they deemed worthy of the version number 1.0, and if you’ve not tried using it recently, you might be in for a pleasant surprise. It’s currently at version 1.2.1.
    I have a license for Affinity Designer on my Mac, but I never got into using it, and I’m not enough of an illustrator to understand any advantages it might have over Inkscape.
    IMO the most important remaining feature of Illustrator, as with Photoshop, is the wide range of well-established third-party plugins.
    I don’t expect Inkscape or Illustrator or any other non-font-focused vector editor to ever offer the kinds of tools that a type designer needs from a dedicated font editor like Robofont, Glyphs, Fontra, FontLab, OTMaster, FontCreator or what have you.
  • Cory Maylett
    Cory Maylett Posts: 248
    edited October 2022
    @John Butler, Inkscape is an SVG editor mostly suitable for on-screen vector use. Unlike Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer, Inkscape does not support CMYK, which causes it to be all but unusable for professional print work.

    Then again, Inkscape is free, which has its advantages.  ;)
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,739
    Freehand was developed not long after and by the same people who developed Fontographer (Altsys). It shared some basic characteristics, especially the pen tool. I used Fontographer from version 1.0 and Illustrator from version 1.0 and much preferred the smoothness and responsiveness of the pen tool in Illustrator, to the point where I drew my early fonts in Illustrator and imported the paths into Fontographer (not something I would recommend). I did eventually get Freehand since it had earlier support for color, but I never used it as much.

    For me, Illustrator peaked at version 8 (1998). Very little, in terms of the drawing functionality has been improved since then, and in many ways it's gotten worse. On the other hand, there are quite a few non-drawing-related features that I would miss if I tried to go back, especially OpenType support (such as it is).

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