The first iPad incarnation of Illustrator, however, is a fully-fledged, powerful drawing tool that, in many ways, boasts features that are more intuitive than the desktop version. When Photoshop for iPad appeared last year, it was panned by many for its severely curtailed toolset. If it seems a little lackluster, it’s because most of the effort this year has clearly gone into… And that, together with improved Cloud support, is the sum total of enhancements in this version. As has long been the case in InDesign, you can now set text to align to the top, middle of bottom of an area text box, or to be vertically justified within it.

It can also snap to the ascender height or either the left or right edge, but it can’t read intermediate values – so you are unable to snap to, say, the top of the lower case letters, or in this case the top of the upper case A as it’s lower than the ascender next to it. Here, a simple horizontal rule is easily made to snap to the baseline of this text. You can now make any line or object snap to type edges without having to outline the text first. You can set the height in pixels, for instance, to match the height to a graphic, and it’s a big time saver over the previous manual manipulation method. This allows you to set the height of the capitals, the x-height or the current text frame. There’s also a new way to set text size, activated by choosing Show Font Height Options from the pop-up menu in the corner of the Character panel.

It’s surprisingly faithful, and a color wheel shows pins marking all the colors used so that they can be tweaked individually. It’s a straightforward process: you choose Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork, and the artwork is immediately matched to the photograph. Illustrator is now able to recolor artwork by sampling colors from placed photographs. First, let’s get the desktop update out of the way. The really big news – the huge news – is that Adobe has now released a version of Illustrator for iPad, and it’s fantastic. The 2021 version of Adobe Illustrator brings few interesting new features, although they should prove useful.

Adobe illustrator 2021