There was a time that I was a virtuoso in Adobe Illustrator.

[chronovore]

For a long while, I worked with Illustrator all day, every day, for the four days a week that I (mostly) worked my way through college. At the time I was so impressed with the Illustrator UI model that I was beginning to wish Adobe would make its own OS; I felt it would trump MacOS for usability. This was the "pre-Photoshop 6 world," you see...

But my one-time prowess has dulled mightily, and even the muscle-memory that is still devoted to chorded keystrokes is betrayed by Adobe's revisions to longstanding keyboard shortcuts, while keeping 80% of them identical. I also find that I'm having a hard time hunting out changes both subtle and gross because my entire fucking UI is in Japanese. So...

Bless these folks' hearts:

• Computer Arts - Keyboard shortcut cards

Update: After finally getting the drawing the way I wanted it, I find that MS Word 2003 is not willing to import .EPS graphics. It demonstrated this to be by crashing grandly when I tried it, somehow eradicating text that I'd written an hour ago, despite the auto-save feature of Word being set for "10 minutes." This also happened to be the text where I'd had an epiphany of not only how the system I'm designing should work, but how to concisely define it.
So now I'm relegating that drawing to the in-app tools that MS Word has, which suck, and trying to remember what the hell I wrote. It was marginally clever. Honest!

Comments

[jameskitty.livejournal.com]

save as a pdf, taking it back as far as it will go in version and features. alt, export for web as a high res jpg, no progressive or any jpeg feature that's useful.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'll try that for the final report.

I was SO annoyed! For now I'm using Word's built-in, crap-tacular drawing tool. I also downloaded "Mind Manager" (overrated crap, as far as I can see) and an open source drawing app that I've yet to install.

[evil-genius.livejournal.com]

Or you could just torrent your favorite flavor of Illustrator(or heaven forbid pick it up dirt cheap on ebay).

Here is the Deluxe 6.0 release for Mac OS ending tomorrow for just 99 cents.
8.0 educational version for the mac ending tomorrow for 20 bucks.
8.0 for windows again less than 20 bucks.

I will never understand why people think they HAVE to use the latest version. 95-98% of Office users could go through thier entire careers never needing anything more complex than Office 4.3. But idioticly people keep handing MS 350 dollars(or more) every few years for functionality so advanced most will never figure out how to use. Much less actually have a need for it.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

I'm of two schools of thought on this:
1) Some people want to buy new things; just as they don't need a /new/ car, they'll buy one anyway. It's "nicer." More applicable, I ALWAYS see people buy a LOT more computer than they need. People who want to cruise the web and do email do not need a US$3000 monster computer. There should be some kind of exchange program where kids who'd actually use those machines get to have them, and the well-off adults who would have over-purchased instead get the kids' hand-me-down computers with a wall-scroll proclaiming how awesomely generous and considerate the donating person is.

2) Specific to MS Office upgrades, it's much like a virus. When someone in a company upgrades their suite, there are features and behaviors that are inconsistent between versions. So it's an arms-race - if /anyone/ upgrades, /everyone/ has to upgrade. Even in cases where it's not true, there are so many instances where it has been historically true that when someone notices that the versions are different, they upgrade out of fear that an incompatibility may disable them at some point in the future.

Thanks for those ideas. I may just ebay one. I'd never deal with any of those OEM creeps, but for some reason eBay seems a little more safe and/or respectable.