Re: Freehand vs Illustrator

At 4:47 AM 5/19/99, Gary Barber wrote:
>But what I need now is an honest, hands on series of options (or mini
>reviews) on which of the two leading players I should choose. Macromedia's
>Freehand or Adobe Illustrator.
>I am very conversant with Photoshop and Flash so its a little hard to
>choose.

Magazine reviews are easy to find online. The "which tool is best" thread
online usually gets "this is what I use so you should too" replies...
you'll usually get better results with requests for specific info comparing
tools.

For "Is either of the two easier to work with Photoshop and Flash?" then
the two are roughly comparable for Photoshop -- main difference is that
ILL8 will go to Photoshop as separate layers. Both support drag'n'drop,
paths, the rest.

For Flash, FreeHand offers: direct optimized SWF export; animated SWF
export; the ability to simplify shapes for smaller filesizes; direct RGB
transfer to Flash; stronger autotrace tool to turn bitmaps to vectors;
"release to layers" to make animated blends easy; mirroring, roughing,
envelopes, 3D rotate and other 2D operations. FreeHand has specifically
changed to accommodate Flash.


FreeHand and Illustrator used to be compared a lot, and both can do
Illustrator's job, but FreeHand also does part of inDesign's job --
multipage ability, fast redraw, graphic/text styles and search'n'replace,
copyfitting, HTML export and the rest make it a much wider tool than
Illustrator. (Rephrased, Illustrator and FreeHand have very different scope
now... different types of tools these days.)

If you'd like, you can pick up prior iterations of this thread by searching
at http://www.deja.com/ with term "FreeHand AND Illustrator"... this will
show what people on Usenet have said over the months. If you're seeking to
check on a particular ability then please advise here, thanks.

jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Offlist email risks capture by the spam filters. I may not see your
email if it's not on the list. Private one-on-one email options are
available via Priority Access: http://www.macromedia.com/support/

HWG: hwg-graphics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA