Illustrator REALLY needs to have a feature (that you can turn on or off) for spell check to have the red squiggly line underneath mis-spelled words, like what InDesign, Microsoft, and many other programs have.

By default, paragraph text is set to hyphenate words that don't fit into the text box. I suggest that the default is to have text not be hyphenated so you can click the box if you want it to be.

No one I know has ever wanted hyphenated words in text, but you have to uncheck the "Hyphenate" box from the Paragraph Palette, it's annoying to have to do that every time I make a new paragraph or paragraph style. (same problem in indesign)

Extend the select menu items to include options for selecting type variations.

Currently strokes can only be aligned to the center of the edge of text (see red stroke in attached example), it would be very helpful to be able to set strokes to inside and especially outside (bottom/green example) of text while still being able to edit it. This is especially useful when you want to make text standout on a busy background. Thank you!

This would be a quick easy way to format a paragraph where each paragraph return becomes a bullet or numbered/lettered list item.

Numbers in numbered lists would be updated automatically when you add or remove paragraphs in the list. Bullets would also flow accordingly when edited.

InDesign has both a "Bulleted List button" and "Numbered List button" in the Control Panel and if these features were added to Illustrator they would be very popular.

I hate having to scroll from the top of the fonts list every time i'm searching for a new font. Currently, in preferences there is an option for only 1 recent font, however, i'd like to be able to disable this feature completely.

It's by far the thing that annoys me the most about Illustrator;
when you have your point text already positioned you need it to be aligned to a side and when you press the "align" button in the paragraph options the text moves and aligns to its previous center.
It's a complete time-waster!

If fonts are missing on open, give the option to expand/convert to outlines. I work in the sign industry, It is a huge hassle to contact customers to have them convert it and re-send it. They frequently don't know how/didn't make the artwork to begin with. I typically get around this using acrobat watermark trick, but it's very time consuming. We have over 6,000 fonts, and we still have missing fonts all the time.

It would be nice if you could have the data merge function like in Indesign so you can import .csv-files.

It would be useful if, while typing/editing text, there was a keyboard shortcut to add BOLD or ITALICS - highlight the word, hit CTRL + B to bold, for example.

I work with a lot of files that come to me with outline text, which I then have to retype from scratch. It would be a really useful feature if outline text could be converted to editable text - could there be some kind of auto-recognition (OCR) of the outline text and generate editable text from this? Built-in OCR?

When copying from one text box with style A, then pasting into a text box with style B -- provide the ability to paste as style B in a single keystroke or step. Currently the default is to keep style A when pasting which requires an additional step to convert the style B.

Add ability to filter out fonts (system/application) from CC font menus. For example the user should be able to hide the 12 STIX fonts that appear in the menu.

I work in the design industry and it is quite annoying that after you have created an outline on a text and saved the document on adobe illustrator, you cannot undo the outline to edit, or find out the typeface/and type information (tracking, font size, kerning).

There needs to be a way to edit/undo the outline

The "TateChuYoko" using for vertical writing text, under use in Japanese environment.
The adjustment value is set only to integers of points and it is very troubling.
In that state, I can only do a rough job too much.
I would like to improve so that more detailed values can be set.

<Japanese>
縦中横設定の調整量がポイントの整数値ごとにしか設定できない。
これでは大雑把な仕事しかできない。
細かい値を設定できるよう改善して欲しい。

I always get annoyed that my font drop down menu always starts at the top in the most recent section.

can i get it to stay at the location where I last opened it/font I last selected?

When you type and than select a text/number on the screen to see the size, the measure box shows for example in "cm" the hight of the text. When you measure the same text/numbers after printing the result is a lot different (smaller) than the measurement on the screen showed. For example a number of 15cm is after printing only 9,4cm.

Correct the size of the fonts in the navigator info box to the real size measurements as the print results.