Comment on I still haven't figured out how to do this
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 1 week agoIllustrator was first, and, like all Adobe products, it has kept a lot of quirks from its past. They have worked to bring them closer, but there are fundamental differences between editing vector and editing pixel images. If you use both tools daily, the quirks they’ve kept sort of make sense.
Adobe didn’t have a page layout program till they bought Aldus Pagemaker, which they kept going until they developed InDesign. They left Pagemaker to rot while they pushed InDesign. So InDesign was made with a similar interface to Photoshop. Same for the others–they came after Photoshop gained traction, so they all have a similar UI.
As a graphic designer, starting in '92, I used QuarkExpress, PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, CorelDraw, and even Corel PhotoPaint. I also used Blender. I knew what each could do better than the other, and used the right tool for the job. Out of all of them CorelDraw was the most complete and broadly competent–it’s Illustrator and InDesign combined. I used Corel Draw and Photoshop 80% of the time.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but for many years, Illustrator only had marquee select by touching, and didn’t have marquee select by enclosing. Corel Draw has both, with enclosing being the default. With marquee select by enclosing, the need for layers is far less. Layers in Illustrator are needed primarily to ease selecting of multiple objects. If you wanted to select that collection of small circles that was totally enclosed by that translucent box in front of it, and they weren’t on separate layers, you had a bad time.
saltesc@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I know where you’re coming from. I started in Corel, then into Macromedia which would later be absorbed into Adobe.
Modern day Illustrator still doesn’t follow the same governance of usability the rest did. Vectoring is just a standard tool in the belt. But the program it’s done in should expectedly have the same behaviours as the companioninh programs.
For example, vectoring in all other modern Adobe software has different keyninfs, methods and behaviours to Illustrator. Things as simple as pathing in PS, AE, and ID is fine differently to Illustrator. Same shit, but different menus, windows, even cursor behaviours.
It’s like all the software that supports driving is left-hand drive. But the one that does it best is inexplicably left-hand drive.
I’ve always understood it as changing its legacy would disrupt the Illustrator base so hard—thanks for proving this, btw—that they just keep it MS Wordy. An application that functions as a rogue. But also why Illustrator is slowly falling out as vector artistry continues to be more irrelevant. Kind of like Dreamweaver’s early end days, but it’s still got plenty of legs left for a while.