- Perspective Drawing
- Variable-Width Strokes
- New Bristle Brush and Other Brush Improvements
- Enhanced Strokes: Dashed-Line Adjustments, Precise Arrowheads
- Shape Builder Tool
- Multiple Artboard Enhancements
- Drawing Enhancements: Joining Paths, Select Behind, Draw Behind, Draw Inside
- Roundtrip Editing with Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5
- Symbol Enhancements
- Crisp Graphics for Web and Mobile Devices
- Summary
Shape Builder Tool
Have you ever wanted to combine shapes or punch one shape from another, only to be faced with the Pathfinder panel and its dizzying array of buttons? Well, no more, thanks to the Shape Builder tool. This interactive tool creates complex shapes by merging and erasing simpler shapes. In other words, after drawing simpler shapes or creating compound paths, you can select the Shape Builder tool, position the pointer over the artwork, and the tool intuitively highlights edges and regions of the selected art that can be merged to form new shapes (see Figure 6).
Figure 6 Whoever thought up the Shape Builder tool should receive an award.
For example, you can draw a stroke across the middle of a circle and quickly create two half-circles, without opening a panel or choosing another tool. The Shape Builder tool can also break overlapping shapes to create distinct objects. It easily adopts art styles when objects are merged, and you can enable the Color Swatch cursor to select colors for your artwork.