I LOVE FREEHAND TOO! and am extremely pissed off that ADOBE or as some people point out MACROMEDIA didnt have the decency to continue producing it. I too will keep using Freehand til it won't budge.
MAYBE THIS THREAD SHOULD BE DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO LOVE FREEHAND. PLEASE, WE DON'T NEED COMMENTS ON HOW ITS DEAD ETC ETC, WE'VE HEARD THEM ALL OVER AND OVER AD NAUSEAM.
WE CAN USE THIS THREAD FOR POSITIVE COMMENTS ON OUR BELOVED AND SOON TO BE MISSED SOFTWARE.
MAYBE ADOBE WILL GET THE MESSAGE THAT THEY MADE A BIG MISTAKE IF WE MAKE THIS THREAD ENORMOUSLY LONG AND FILLED WITH REASONS FREEHAND SHOULD HAVE BEEN MAINTAINED BY ADOBE OR SOLD TO A COMPANY THAT COULD CONTINUE DEVELOPING IT
AGAIN NEGATIVE COMMENTS HAVE BEEN HEARD AND UNDERSTOOD, WE GOT THE MESSAGE, ITS DEAD I KNOW......ENUF SAID.
DG

"Lovers"? "Married" to a software? "Till death us do part"?

Gag me.

You guys are REALLY overstating things here. No one has advocated FH's advantages more than I (and I still do). But this is software. One would think you guys are leather-jacket wearing Harley riders talking about their old, smelly, oily, vibrating, noisy bikes, fercryinoutloud.

> MAYBE THIS THREAD SHOULD BE DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO LOVE FREEHAND. PLEASE, WE DON'T NEED COMMENTS ON HOW ITS DEAD ETC ETC, WE'VE HEARD THEM ALL OVER AND OVER AD NAUSEAM.

DG, this is an open forum. Your starting a thread does not in any way entitle you to "disallow" dissenting viewpoints (least of all those from *other FH users*). And do you think "over and over ad nauseam" [sic] does not apply to *your* viewpoint here? Sheesh, a thread like this really does add fuel to the fire of AI-only users who accuse FH-only users of whining like babies. This kind of nonsense does a *disservice* to the FH community.

So sorry to break your "rules", but you'll just have to take this as friendly advice, because that's really what it is:

I can understand your being disappointed. But face it: You guys are SO upset because you have procrastinated. You're like the student who shows up ten minutes late for class and then blames the teacher for rushing through material when in fact you haven't even cracked the textbook, let alone done your homework.

Doesn't matter if it's Illustrator, Canvas, Draw, or one of the new upstarts, but you need to pick your poison, buckle down, and get up-to-speed and comfortable in some other vector drawing program, pronto. You need to loose your workaday mission-critical dependency upon a discontinued software. Thereafter you can still vent about FH advantages which you know to be true, but you won't feel nearly so threatened.

I mean, c'mon! If you were running the illustration department for a large firm, would you not expect to be fired for failure to be prepared for a tool shift after it has been clear for years that your present mission-critical system stands a high probablility of being discontinued?

It's not like you couldn't see this coming. You guys really give new life to the catchphrase, "Get over it."

JET

But FH is discontinued.. which is a technically formal way of saying it's....

dead dead dead.

Sorry, could't resist. But really, I don't see why your complaining about people citing the product's demise is more legit than people complaining about Macrodobe's decisions and lamenting the abandonment of a wonderful product.

Me, I don't consider myself married to a piece of software. I try not to confuse bits of code, however useful, with the woman I love - for one thing, she wouldn't have it.

As per JET's tone, this forum certainly does resemble a kind of ongoing soap opera. I try to stay away but I just can't; after all, I'm still using FH too.

JETLT wrote:

> I mean, really! Re-read the above posts. Does that stuff not sound rather
> irrationally over-the-top to you?

Sure does. :)

I have a KitchenAid food processor that whips, kneads, blends, purees, chops
and grates. It does a lot of stuff but it's cumbersome, temperamental and a
huge nuisance to wash up.

Illustrator is a bit like the food processor -- it has features I'd use once
a year, but simple tasks like selecting things and cutting things are
difficult.

FreeHand is like my favorite French knife and cutting board, used many times
every day. Need to dice half an onion or cut a red pepper into strips? I'm
done and washed up in seconds.

Someone it trying to convince me that the food processor is 'better'. I feel
that I'm on the brink of losing my lovely French knife forever.

Judy Arndt

The Kitchen-Aid / French knife analogy I can buy.

The "ever faithful to my poor invalid wife" metaphor is, well, just bizzare. And it will be viewed as bizzare by people on both sides of the AI / FH divide (which shouldn't even be a divide). It miserably fails to explain anything objectively meaningful about FH's advantages to anyone who can exert influence on the matter: Adobe staffers or Illustrator users. They are just as "passionate" (though perhaps less literally) about AI. So who can yell (or in this case, weep) the loudest bears no effect.

But that said, I don't think the French knife analogy really fits, either, only for this reason: It paints FH as the less technologically-sophisticated of the two. That's one of the problems I perceive among AI-only users. They often mistake complication for sophistication, when in fact, FH's interface in most commonly-needed functions is *both* more capable and simpler. That is the essence of true sophistication: It's about functional elegance.

The fact is, most AI-proficient users who have never developed proficiency in FH really do not know how much less tedious things can be. So they are much more tolerant of needless tedium because they think it the norm. They think it a necessary evil.

I'd be wasting my breath here to list examples--that's better done in the AI forum where the effort might actually have some impact. So I'll just give the one most obvious example: FH's one pointer has always been able to do more, do it easier, and do it with more logical consistency, than AI's two. That's one of the primary interface differences--not because of the presence or absense of complicated features like Brushes, or raster Effects; but because selection is absolutely bedrock foundational in any object-oriented graphics program. The selection interface and logic affects ease-of-use in *everything*. In FH, selection is both simpler and more sophisticated.

So that's why I cringe a little whenever someone paints a FH vs. AI analogy as a comparison between a complicated vs. a simple tool. Neither is a simple tool. It's not the difference between a rock-reliable hatchet and a table saw. It's the difference between two table saws, one of which is simply built to higher quality, usability, accuracy, versatility, and practicality standards.

Cutting tools is a particularly interesting choice of metaphor. In your analogy, you would still have to admit that the Kitchen Aid, despite its greater complication, can do alot more slicing and dicing in less time than even the most carefully honed French knife. So at least a production environment would argue in favor of the Kitchen Aid. But the pro-FH argument is one that argues in favor of *both* easier use *and* greater efficiency. When it comes to cutting tools, AI doesn't even *have* a French Knife *or* a Kitchen Aid. It has a pair of rusty scissors and a downright neurotic, broken Exacto knife that doesn't know what an open path is.

;-)

JET

> I have a KitchenAid food processor that whips, kneads, blends, purees, chops
> and grates. It does a lot of stuff but it's cumbersome, temperamental and a
> huge nuisance to wash up.

> FreeHand is like my favorite French knife and cutting board, used many times
> every day. Need to dice half an onion or cut a red pepper into strips? I'm
> done and washed up in seconds.

Agreed, but I prefer German knives. Kitchen Aid is not that difficult to wash up, even after making sausages. ;)

Jukka

Hey, don't put this on either myself or JET... and let's not paint the two of us as some kind of nefarious tag team. Read back on a fairly recent thread, for example, in which we've clashed at length on the finer points on masking. And if you really pause to examine things, you'll find that each of us in here have distinctly different characters... pretending otherwise does all a disservice.

Anyway, it seems to me that your last post is terribly negative, even snippy - the very thing you accuse myself and JET of. What's up with that? You are free to hold out and use FH as long as you can - you will doubtless be in good company, as most people in here have signaled to stick with FH until the bitter end. Just as others are free to question that approach.

Hey man, it's only a forum!

Armadillo wrote:

> Agreed, but I prefer German knives.

Man, you guys are hard to please! Okay, my knife is actually a German J.A.
Henckels professional chef's knife. I grew up calling a knife of that shape
a French knife.

In keeping with the theme of this thread, losing FreeHand will be like
losing my rugged, handsome German chef's knife. Better? ;-)

JET, I couldn't agree more with your point about functional elegance. I have
been trying to do a few jobs in AI CS3, but I'm constantly coming up against
tasks that can't be done or that require special plug-ins or scripts.

For example, I can't figure out the AI equivalent of FH's

Select>Stroke width/Min (n)/Max (n)/Add to Selection
Then
Select stroke color within selection

I know, I should ask on the AI forum, but it's all so time consuming. First
a search through AI Help files. Then a forum search to see if the question
has already been answered. I don't want to alienate AI users into thinking
I'm only there to challenge them to admit that many tasks are much simpler
in FH.

Meanwhile, jobs keep coming in and I return to work in FreeHand, which for
me is as familiar and efficient as cooking in my own kitchen.

Judy Arndt

Well Max you're right i was snippy and I must apologize for that and painting you with the same brush as JET. As you pointed out that you clashed at length with JET on another thread, just re-iterated my point. Lets use this thread for positive comments and use all the other hundreds if not thousands of threads to clash it out, who has the best software....etc etc. If we don't want to write about how we love FH, no-one pulling anyone's leg to do so. Especially not me. I must admit I wont run out to buy CS3 so fast, I will at least wait til I know it has no bugs. Then for a while I will use it to drag FHMX files into, if I need to send an Illy doc to someone, and I will dabble in it until I get used to it. But if I can go on earning a great salary with FH, I will do just that for the forseeable future. Also the idea was to get a thread like the one a http://www.enrichdesign.com/freehand.html
where there has been over 21,000 entrees from people around the world who still love FH over to this forum, to be more visible. It was just a thought, perhaps not a good idea.
rgds,
Dg

> admitting this weakens my complaint about so many things in AI
requiring plug-ins.

You noticed that, did you? ;-)

> I'd like an AI CS3 workaround for custom rulers and scale drawing...

Me, too--to go with those dimensions tools that neither AI nor FH has.

;-)

Except, of course, for the "workaround" part. I'm kinda tired of workarounds.

JET

> For example, I can't figure out the AI equivalent of FH's
> Select>Stroke width/Min (n)/Max (n)/Add to Selection
> Then
> Select stroke color within selection

1. Line tool: Draw a line. Give it a black stroke, no fill, .25 pt. stroke weight.

2. AltShiftDrag a copy of the line toward the right.

3. Transform Again (Ctrl D) 7 times.

You should now have nine paths.

4. Give the 2nd through 5th a stroke weight of . 5 pt.

5. Give the 6th and 7th a stroke weight of .75.

6. Give the 8th a stroke weight of 1 pt.

7. Give the 1st, 3rd and 6th a red stroke.

8. Give the 9th a green stroke and set its weight to 3 pts. Leave it selected.

9. DoubleClick the Magic Wand Tool. Turn on the StrokeColor checkbox. Set its Tolerance field to zero. Turn on the Stroke Weight checkbox. Set its Tolerance field to .25 pt.

10. Magic Wand Tool: ShiftClick the third path. The first, third, and sixth paths are added to the current selection because they are within .25 pt of the sampled path’s weight, and are the same color as the sampled path.

11. Click (without Shift) the 8th path. Only the 7th and 8th become selected, because only they are within the stroke weight tolerance.

Now, as I'm sure *you* know, I am by no means claiming that AI's Magic Wand tool and pitiful handful of Select Same commands are any match for FH's GF&R, which is why:

> I don't want to alienate AI users into thinking I'm only there to challenge them to admit that many tasks are much simpler in FH.

I don't think you have to worry about that. I'm not nearly so civil as you when touting FH's advantages in the AI forums. So I've already appropriated that distinction. And I'll be hornswaggled if I let you usurp the "honor" of most despised FH advocate. ;-)

JET

JET,
"am extremely pissed off that ADOBE or as some people point out MACROMEDIA didnt have the decency to continue producing it. "
is not a negative comment, but rather my feelings about the demise and discontinuation of FH. As well I mention that other people point blame at one of the 2 merged companies. As for stating that this is a negative comment, you are reading way too deep into it.
dg

d.m.gold wrote:

> I must admit I wont run out to buy CS3 so fast, I will at least wait til I
> know it has no bugs. Then for a while I will use it to drag FHMX files into,
> if I need to send an Illy doc to someone, and I will dabble in it until I get
> used to it.

In my opinion, this is a counter-productive strategy. It would be very
useful if FH power users like yourself tried AI CS3 and posted the problems
they encounter to the Illustrator forums. Only with many voices asking for
the same functionality, can we hope to see changes to Illustrator.

AI CS3 has bugs. So does FreeHand MX.

Judy Arndt

> is not a negative comment, but rather my feelings
> As for stating that this is a negative comment, you are reading way too deep into it.

DG, I couldn't care less about your skewed idea of what's "positive" or "negative."

JET

Judy,
Thanks for your insight regarding the "squabbling".
My concern is with FHMX and my career, I have been using FH since '90 and when Illy started showing up everywhere,
I refused to use it as my main graphic tool because I felt it lacked the functions that I used everyday with FH.
I have always had a competitive edge in my industry ( Fashion) and have done quite well.... My illustrations and presentation boards always seem to be more in-depth and are completed much faster. Every company I've worked for noticed the difference and allowed me and my team to use FH. I am at a crossroads now because of the impending end of FH, which will force me to use Illy. I am very comfortable using FH till it just won't budge. I would like to show you ( Judy) my work so you can see what I am talking about, and why I think FH is the only software that will do what i want and live up to my needs. ( not sure how to upload images) Maybe you have some insight on this issue....
Thanks,
Dg

I agree with you!
Freehand is dead, but it does not deserve to die.

So i save my Freehand mx installing disk careful. i also like it more than illustrator!

Drop freehand is the huge mistake of adobe