Product Reviews

There are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop, but following the demise of FreeHand, Corel Draw and Canvas on the Mac, there are fewer alternatives to that other software behemoth, Illustrator.

Intaglio is one of a clutch of vector editing applications that offer many of Illustrator's features at a price most designers should be able to afford.

Although the interface looks similar to that found on early versions of FreeHand, with a single line of tools held in a palette on the left, it's Illustrator users who will feel most comfortable with this application, as most of its tools work in a familiar way.

Its Bézier Path tool, for example, works almost exactly as Illustrator users would expect, with only minor differences. For example, when closing a path drawn with the Pen tool in Intaglio, you need to Altclick the originating point, rather than simply clicking it as you would in Illustrator. However, you will occasionally miss the level of Illustrator's detail - Ctrl-clicking an object brings up document-wide rather than context-sensitive commands.

Elsewhere, all common drawing tools are present, such as the ability to combine, separate or unite paths to create objects, although there are no warping or extrusion functions. By way of compensation Intaglio boasts an Arc tool, which can create pie chart shapes quickly. Just click and drag from the centre of the arc to the start point, to choose the object's radius, then click and Alt-drag to create a slice.

Intaglio also boasts a decent text editor, with kerning, baseline and leading adjustable from the Text palette. Unusually, the text and its surrounding box are treated as one, which might take getting used to. Dragging the

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surrounding box's handle resizes the text rather than expanding the content area, and double-clicking on the text box with the Selection tool brings up the Text palette, rather than placing the cursor inside the text box. But this does mean that you can easily adjust the box, and the text inside will remain editable.

Intaglio's import and export functions are better than most similarly priced vector-editing applications, like VectorDesigner. As well as EPS, SVG and bitmap file formats, it will import and export PDFs, and we were pleased to see that on the test PDF we imported, individual objects remained editable.

Intaglio can apply a number of standard effects, such as glows, drop shadows and blurs, on vectors. But Mac OS X 10.4 users with capable graphics cards can also use more advanced Core Image effects, which include far more powerful colour correction and distortion tools, although strangely you have to first turn these effects on in a submenu of the Effects Inspector palette before you can choose them. The effects are listed in the palette in the order that they are applied, and you can rearrange them by dragging them around. Perhaps the best feature of the effects is that they can be applied to any element. You can blur lines, drop-shadow text and colour adjust the content of imported PDFs, yet they remain editable as vectors; only being converted to bitmaps when exported.

Other useful additions include Spotlight support for document text and metadata, while the bundled Automator actions provide a more user-friendly front end to the program's existing AppleScript dictionary. Even though the range of actions are too limited, it's good to see a drawing application offering scripting support.

One sticking point for many thinking of switching from Illustrator is colour support. With Intaglio, you can choose between CMYK, RGB and greyscale as your default colour space, and quickly set a ColorSync profile for each through a drop-down menu. There is, however, no way to create spot colours, which will rule it out for many.

Almost as easy to use as Lineform, Intaglio's excellent importing options put it ahead of other budget illustration tools. While it doesn't quite offer all of Illustrator's range of features, for those wanting a simple vector-editing program, this will fit the bill.