It's barely been 18 months since Adobe released Illustrator 9, and after such a major upgrade you'd be forgiven for expecting something a little less ambitious this time around.

Think again. Version 10 maintains Illustrator's position as the number one vector graphics application and is the choice of professional illustrators.

However, many of the new features are designed to position Illustrator as a 'network publishing' application, capable of producing content for devices ranging from print-based media to PDAs.

Features such as symbols, object-based slicing with support for CSS (cascading style sheets) layers, dynamic data-driven graphics, and SVG round-tripping combine to make this a welcome update. A selection of new drawing tools are aimed at making complex shape creation and editing much simpler, while new live distortion effects expand the creative options available.

If Macromedia had one advantage over Adobe it was symbols. Used by Flash, Fireworks and Freehand, symbols keep file sizes to a minimum by representing multiple instances of an object with reference to a single master original. However, Illustrator 10's implementation of symbols goes even further than Freehand's by introducing new symbolism tools.

The symbol sprayer tool creates naturalistic groups of objects using symbols. In practice it works in much the same way as the scatter brushes, with dialog box settings determining symbol density, size and area covered.

Individual instances can be modified using any of the symbolism tools including the symbol scruncher, shifter, styler, screener, spinner and sizer.

New slicing tools make Illustrator 10 an ideal choice for web development. Automatic object-based slicing combined with support for CSS layers can be used to create layer-based alternatives - for multiple language versions of a site, for example - as well as overlapping transparent slices.

Illustrator's dynamic data-driven graphics feature is another step on the road to separating web content from design. This provides a way of defining graphics and text as variables which can be linked to fields in an ODBC-compliant database or a dynamic image server such as Adobe's AlterCast.

A placeholder object is defined as a variable in the Variables palette, which is also used to create sample datasets - these could be replacement text, symbols or product pack shots. You can then view the sample datasets in situ to make sure there are no problems with fit.

Although Illustrator's Flash export features have been enhanced (Illustrator symbols become Flash symbols when you export to swf), as you would expect it's the support for the Adobe-developed and W3C-supported (World Wide Web Consortium) SVG format that gets most attention. SVG is now a native Illustrator format, which means you can import and edit SVG files created with any other editor.

Illustrator 10's live distortion effects provide new ways of contorting text and graphics while still allowing editing of the underlying elements. There are 15 customisable warp settings, including staples such as arc, flag, wave and squeeze. The Make From Mesh command superimposes a grid over objects, and the nodes can then be pulled to create freeform distortions.

Finally, seven new liquefy tools provide goo-type distortions.

This is still only the half of it. New drawing tools simplify the creation of lines and arcs, and there are dedicated tools for drawing rectangular and polar grids. The problems editing compound shapes have been addressed by enabling the editing of component paths.

Illustrator 10 can integrate better with Photoshop, GoLive and InDesign, has improved scripting support, a magic wand tool, flattener preview and rasterise live effect. It hardly seems possible, but it's a great improvment on version.

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