Concerning software (part two)
Posted on
Adobe Illustrator is one of my favourite software applications. It's a package for creating vector graphics and is extremely good at it. It's superb for logos and scalable graphics and generates images that can be used in almost any manner imaginable, at virtually any size. As a designer—albeit only a part-time one these days—I use it a lot. But even this wonderful piece of software has its flaws. And, unfortunately, they are many.
I'm referring primarily to the version(s) available for Windows, since that's the platform I would generally use it on. I do have a Mac, but I've just never got around to buying Adobe's Creative Suite for it and, since I already have it on my PC, I don't see the point. Some of these issues may, however, be specific to Windows. Until such time as I try it properly on Mac, I won't know.
Let's first start with the behaviour of the application window itself. Any other application on Windows will maximise and restore on command. You’ll generally have three buttons in the upper right of the screen: one to minimise it to the start bar, one to restore/maximise it and one to close it. Illustrator is no different in that respect. It has these buttons and you can use them as advertised. I almost always like to use applications fully maximised to fill my screen—I've paid for a big monitor, so I may as well use it. Illustrator can do this just fine… but it isn't happy about it. For some reason if you open a new file, it will insist on 'restoring' itself to a non-maximised state. It annoys me immensely as I see no good reason for it.
Another issue I have with it is the default font: Myriad Pro. It's not hideous, but it's not pretty either and I never use it. In fact, when I'm at work, I almost always create graphics with another very specific font. But Illustrator isn't happy about that. It will always try to default back to Myriad at any chance it gets. For example, if I create a graph image and modify the data, when I apply that change, chances are it'll assume I also wanted to resize all of the text and change the font too. Wrong! I know I can (apparently) change the default font, but finding out how to do it isn't as easy as you might think. I once found some instructions and followed them to the letter, which achieved precisely nothing.
On the subject of graphs, which I produce a lot of in Illustrator for publications at work, the control is among the most primitive in existence. Don’t get me wrong: the end result, after a wealth of tweaking, looks as impressive as any other Illustrator graphic, but getting to that result is an absolute pain. As well as the aforementioned font changing issues, it lacks common sense of any kind.
The data interface, for example, takes the appearance of a typical spreadsheet, but behaves nothing like one. You can't use the cursor keys to move along text within an individual cell; you can't delete the contents of more than one cell at a time; you can’t use alt+tab to move between applications to copy and paste without having to click into the grid again... Frankly it's just annoying and it's always a relief to get through that stage, even if it means you still have to reformat the graph (again) once you're done there.
And the graph formatting is just irritating. You'd think it would be more customisable. No. You can get everything looking perfect, but as soon as you realise you need to make even just a minor alteration to the data, you'll find you can't do so without it restoring everything back to how it was before. For example, I quite often need to have axis labels for a bar graph appearing on or above the actual bars, rather than underneath them. I can position them all perfectly, but if I then tweak the data, I'll have to do it all over again. And it's not like it just restores the labels to a 'standard' position (e.g. below or next to the axis). It will just move them somewhere else.
Finally, I hate that I can't specify an absolute position for certain types of shape—the most absurd being text! Any other shape will allow you to specify exactly where you want it on the page in the units the document is measured in (pixels, millimetres, centimetres, etc.). But not text (or graphs!). For that, you either have to guess, or convert it to a shape (or to outlines). And then obviously you can't modify it in the same way again.
All of these things one can work around. It's easy to do when you're used to it. But for the life of me, I just can't figure out why these things behave the way they do. There’s just no practical reason for it. Ah, well. It's still a very useful application and I'm not aware of anything better out there for doing what I want to do with it.