1. I have yet to find an option to keep BOTH Acrobat 7 Professional and Acrobat 8 Professional (part of the CS3 Web Premium suite) on the same PC. I noticed that during installation, the installer tells you that v7 will be removed. If this is indeed the only option, I think this is a bad decision and poor PR on Adobe’s part.

2. It would seem that Illustrator CS3 is significantly slower than CS2, so I tried briefly doing some of our poster preparation work in the latter. However, when you save the file, Illustrator CS3 automatically opens it! This doesn’t happen when you choose Save As from CS2. We are investing on more memory to max out our current RAM to 4GB total, which will hopefully improve the performance of CS3.

3. SVG support is (thankfully) retained in CS3.

When preparing artwork for printing, it is best not to select all objects and then flatten transparency because there is a risk that the .ai file would be saved in this state. You can Save a Copy and choose PDF as the format, and in the subsequent dialogue specify Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3) compatibility. Then in the Advanced Section, specify 2400 ppi for the Line Art and Text resolution and 300 ppi for Gradient and Mesh resolution, with “Preserve Overprint” checked. BETTER YET, just Save a Copy as PDF, and then do all the flatten transparency steps within Acrobat Professional.

For better-quality (large) prints, choose Effect > Document Raster Effects Settings > Resolution (Other) –> set to 600 ppi. Also, ensure that the Color Model is always CMYK.