Illustrator can now handle multipage projects. That critical feature, which has been Illustrator's weak spot for generations, finally provides a reason for users of older versions to update to Illustrator CS4. True there are some other very nice capabilities introduced in the latest iteration as well, but the simple ability to create the front and the back of a document in a single file thrill legions of designers who've repeatedly thought about switching to CorelDraw in disgust.

Granted, the implementation is a bit odd. with CS3, Adobe introduced a crop tool that allowed you to define sections that could be individually printed or processed by Acrobat. with CS4 the company extends those crop areas to act as separate Artboards and each Artboard is sort of threated like a page. the benifit of this architectureis that the Artboards can be any size, so you can mix a variety of page sizes and types within a single document. Each Artboard is numbered like a page, and if you delete an Artboard, Illustrator will renumber to maintain the sequence. you can create a document with a predefined number of Artboards, or create them on the fly by simply creating a crop. this architecture is especially well suited to creating tiled prints.



If you actually use Illustrator for Illustration, rather than page layout, you'll really like the blob brush, which allows for more natural stroke blending. Rather than preserving each stroke as an individual path, it combines the strokes ot the erasures in a single path. if gradiants are your thing, the new interactive gradiant widget makes creating and editing them a more streamlined process plus it now supports transprancy and elliptical gradiants. it does bear saying that coreldraw has also had these apabilities for several versions.

Over al i think the benifits of multiple Artboards outweigh their frustrations for long-time Illustrator users, making it worth the upgrade. but don't feel bad if you've got some lingering annoyance that it should have had these must have features a couple versions ago.