Illustrator Compatibility Question: CS3 to CC2022

[WildWestDesigns]

Is all the trouble not worth not paying $20-$30/month for illustrator cloud?

That all depends.

I went through a lot of trouble and more compared to what was discussed here with moving over and I found it worth far more compared to go to their cloud. Now that is me and that isn't everyone.

 

[Bobby H]

However, those references in ISO 32000-1, which is what you are talking about with 1.7, wasn't those specs documented on Adobe's website? While not part of the standard, I do believe at least one time, they were documented.

Adobe published specifications of PDF 1.7 on their website. They're still patented, proprietary features. The PDF 2.0 spec (ISO-32000-2) does not include the proprietary things Adobe put into the 1.7 spec.

Adding the issue, there are certain new graphics technologies PDF does not yet support natively. OpenType Variable fonts is one example; they cannot be properly embedded into PDFs without being converted into a static subset. There is work going on to change that. But just like how SVG has been with web graphics, PDF is another thing which is a work in progress. When people use some of the newest bells and whistles in applications like CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator they're going to be best off saving those files in the latest versions of the native formats of those applications.

Is all the trouble not worth not paying $20-$30/month for illustrator cloud?

It all depends on your specific work-flow.

One critical factor is whether a firm receives a lot of customer-provided art files, assets, etc that are generated in applications like Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, etc. In the case of Illustrator absolutely none of its rivals can fully cover its feature set in order to open modern AI files with 100% accuracy.

I know this all too well from my own experience. I've used both CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator for a very long time. I also have Affinity Designer (Win & iPad versions), Inkscape, Vectornator (iPad) and Autodesk Graphic (iPad). Moving art files between those different environments is tricky. In the case of Illustrator there is a number of features and effects that just do not work outside of Illustrator. Depending on the nature of customer provided files I may end up doing all the work on a project within Illustrator and creating PDFs in there to send to one of our Adobe-certified RIP applications for large format output.

It sucks having to "rent" software, but it sucks even worse to have to waste hours trying to repair Illustrator-based artwork that failed to import into CorelDRAW or another application's non-native environment accurately. It's a lot easier and cheaper from a labor standpoint to just have the right application available to use.

If you don't have to deal with customer provided artwork, or the artwork you get from clients isn't Adobe flavored then you have more freedom to use whatever applications you prefer.

Of course the bigger thing is all the creative features loaded into Illustrator and other Adobe applications. Creative Cloud isn't cheap. But you get a heck of a lot for that $54 per month fee. The fonts service just on its own is worth a fortune. There is a lot of features I really like in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere and Audition. On top of that I'm paying the yearly fee for Astute Graphics' extremely impressive set of Illustrator plugins. That suite of plugins opens a lot of new creative possibilities and time-saving tricks.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Adobe published specifications of PDF 1.7 on their website. They're still patented, proprietary features. The PDF 2.0 spec (ISO-32000-2) does not include the proprietary things Adobe put into the 1.7 spec.

No, I believe that the new specs on the ISO reconciles with non proprietary bits of 1.7 with the open standard equivalent (at the time). But I could have read that wrong.

There will always be something that will have to play catch up. But there is a different mindset with worrying about being bleeding edge versus what is supposed to be long term. The bleeding edge features of programs nowadays, may not even be around long term as well.