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Brian wrote:
I have never used Freehand, but I would be very interested to know what it is like. I know it is a bit off topic here, but how would you compare it with Illustrator. Not a feature for feature comparison, just generally as a user (ease of use, speed of use, etc). I am always interested in looking at alternatives and what others feel works best.
I have used Freehand since version 2.0 and Illustrator since Illustrator 88. I’ve used both applications, up to and including the current versions (Freehand MX and Illustrator CS), in aprofessional production environment.
I don’t like Freehand, and find Illustrator much easier to use. In my experience, Freehand has many weaknesses when compared to Illustrator, including:
-A much less intuitive inspector. It is not possible to look at an object in Freehand just by clicking on it and see at a glance if the fill is spot color or process color, particularly if the color is part of a gradient.
– Freehand has many effects such as drop shadow effects which look great on the screen, and print to a consumer inkjet printer fine,but don’t work in a prepress environment. Freehand renders these effects internally as raster RGB effects, and outputs them as raster CMY rather than CMYK; what that means in English is that nice, beautiful, soft drop shadow that looks so gorgeous on your screen looks like crap in print.
– Freehand’s vector masking is quite primitive and crude compared to Illustrator’s. In Illustrator, you mask an object by drawing the mask, clicking on the object and the mask, and choosing Create Mask from a menu. In Freehand, you draw the mask, click on the object you want to mask, cut it to the Clipboard, and paste it into the mask. If the object you’re masking happens to be, oh, say, a 48MB placed image, then be prepared for it to take a while, and of course you’ll lose whatever else was on the clipboard…
– Illustrator makes it easier to manipulate single points on a curve or single elements within a group than Freehand; it’s slightly clumsier in Freehand.
– Illustrator has the Pathfinder, a beautiful suite of tools that will find the intersection or difference of two vector objects, divide a group of objects, punch one object out of another, and do similar tasks. Freehand’s suite of tools for manipulating overlapping vector objects is much less extensive and not as sophisticated.
I’m also a lot less fond of Freehand’s user interface in general, even though until Illustrator 8 I used Freehand more often and for more complex projects. This complaint extends beyond Freehand; I find that other Macromedia apps, such as Director and Dreamweaver, have similar awkwardnesses in their user interface.
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