Macromedia Freehand 10

Richard Price
21 June 2001

Since it first saw the light of day in 1988, Freehand, a vector based drawing program, has developed into a tightly integrated tool for professional designers and a worthwhile adversary to PageMaker and Illustrator.

The most noticeable and radical change from version 9 to version 10 is the interface. Anyone familiar with other Macromedia products will be quite at home with Freehand 10, which has a standardised Macromedia interface. Users of older versions may be left wondering where some of the tools are, but they don't take long to find.

The colour selection process and the Macromedia pen tool now work in much the same way in Flash, Fireworks and Freehand. Users more familiar with Adobe Illustrator can even set the Pen preferences in Freehand to work in a similar manner.

Freehand 10 also handles PDF (portable document format) files. When exporting to PDF, it's almost as good as PageMaker, and a lot easier! However, I had a bit of trouble trying to embed some fonts when exporting to PDF.

As well as making it easier to switch between applications, Freehand 10 has also been closely integrated with Flash. I am pleased to see that version 10 comes with a Flash navigation panel so Flash functions like Internet links and Flash actions can be applied from within Freehand 10. A new Flash Player window also means SWF animations can be played and tested in Freehand 10 before they are exported.

The close integration also means designers can take advantage of the sophisticated drawing tools in Freehand 10 to create artwork that can be animated in Flash

Any designer who has set up multi-page documents will be pleased to see that Freehand like PageMaker now supports Master Pages. I don't know what took them so long to get around to it, but it sure makes life easier. Master pages work like templates and hold objects and page attributes that are shared by multiple pages in a document. They can also be exported as symbol library items, shared with other users, or edited at any time.

Users are not limited to printing out whole pages for proofing either. Portions of a page, or the entire work area, can be printed with the new Print Area feature. It is a simple matter of clicking and dragging over the area to define what needs to be printed.

The Symbol library is another neat, new feature. Symbols in the library can be edited using most of the editing tools and functions in Freehand 10. These changes are then instantly applied to multiple instances of the symbol in the document.

There are a number of handy additions to Freehand that make it possible to churn out professional looking artwork regardless of your level of expertise.
With the colour gradient tool even a novice can easily bring flat images to life by creating multi-colour gradients that follow the contour of an outline path.

My favourite addition is the new symbol-based brush and spray strokes. Using symbols it is possible to create your own brush strokes and then apply them to any path. It works in a similar fashion to creating symbols. To quickly draw a meadow full of flowers just create a symbol, import it as a brush stroke and spray or paint it across the page.

Macromedia is positioning Freehand as a multi-publishing tool and has provided an Export to HTML function and wizard, but don't expect miracles. I only had the beta version and never managed to get it to work properly.

Freehand 10 is available for Windows and Mac OS as well as Mac OS X

Price AU$999 (upgrades AU$349)
www.macromedia.com

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com