Freehand

Maybe old news to some, and maybe the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, but I remember a time when Freehand was the only illustration app available for the Mac. That is if you don't count MacDraw, which no one ever does, even way back in the day. When Freehand hit the streets, it was the most amazing thing any of us had ever seen.

I started using Freehand at version one and still use it to this day. So, to say when I got the notice from Macworld in my RSS reader this morning, it sort of choked me up a bit.

Sure... I know Illustrator well enough to switch, and fairly painlessly, but I find myself wanting to reflect a bit and properly mourn the loss of my friend, Freehand.

Let's say you have an object that is 22cm wide and you need to make it 2cm wider. You could calculate the amount and punch in 24cm, but if you had a more complex calculation, you may not be able to do it without a calculator. For example 12.3cm-1pt.

Good news, you don't need to bring up the calculator and convert measurement and do the math yourself. You can simply type in the calculation straight into the fields in the transform palette. Illustrator and Freehand both have the capability to do these calculations immediately. You can add, substract, multiply, divide and also mix units of measure.

Remember how joyfully you contributed to deforestation when you got your first spirograph at the age of five? You can relive the experience in a much more environmentally friendly way using Illustrator or any other vector application if you have a fast enough computer.

Macromedia Freehand's days may be numbered, but we shouldn't forget about it yet. Hopefully the feature below and many others not existing in Illustrator will find their way into the next version of Adobe's vector application.

In Freehand MX you can apply more than one stroke or fill to an object. In this example there is a thick white border on the letters. As a second layer of stroke that is covering the white one, I applied a thinner orange stroke. And finally there is an even thinner white stroke in the middle. You can download the file for closer inspection.

To add a new stroke or fill you just need to press the little plus button with the relevant icon and you will be able to see how the different strokes and fills are layered above each other. You can also move these layers around like you would do in PhotoShop.

What other features would you like to be saved from Freehand if it happens to be phased out?

In Freehand when you start dragging with the subselect tool (white arrow) you may realize that the starting point of is a bit off. You don't need to try dragging again and again until you find the right starting point. You can press space while dragging to momentarily change the function of the tool (and the cursor too) to move instead of drag. Once you start using it, you won't be able to live without it. Btw, this works in PS too, but it's more useful in vector applications.

If you have a Freehand document that has elements you want to add to the document you're working on you don't need to open the file to select it's contents and than paste them into your working document. Just take the document that contains the elements you need and drop it over your working document.

Many times we use certain elements on our design repetitively. Logos for example are usually appearing several times throughout our documents. Once this repetitive element changes, we have to go through our document updating all the instances. There is a better way to do it. If you are familiar with Flash, you already know what I'm gonna say. In Freehand (and Illustrator) there is a panel called Library that can be used to keep frequently used elements.

To demonstrate the function let's suppose we've designed a logo. Once it's done we group it and drag it into the Library. You can rename it later if you want.

Let's design stationary with our logo. Every time we need a copy of the logo for the different elements of the stationary we should drag the logo out from the library. Notice that the Library keeps count of how many times we used the logo in our document.

Now that we look at the whole document we realize that we are not happy with the logo. Instead of replacing all the instances of the logo with the redesigned one, we can simply double click the library item. A new window will open with the logo.

Let's redesign the logo a bit and close the window.

Wow! All the instances of our logo have been automatically updated. That's what I call productivity.

This is not a trick, but a function, which is overlooked by some Freehand users. It's common to use the Window/Inspector/Documents palette for such operations, but there is a much better way to do it.

Select the page tool (the third arrow) in the toolbar (or just press D) and select a page. With this tool you can move around the pages by clicking and dragging them. If you press Alt you will make a copy of the page. Press Backspace and it will delete the page. It basically treats pages like regular objects.