Professional artists take for granted the rivalry between Adobe Illustrator and Aldus FreeHand. While Illustrator has, in my opinion, maintained an edge over FreeHand in recent years, it clearly lacked significant functions that FreeHand provided — foremost among them layers, automated gradations, multiple undos, support for TIFF images, and an editable preview mode. The result is that most of us purchased both programs. I have long hoped one of these programs — I don’t care which — would blow the other one out of the water so that I and other artists could settle on a single program and save a few hundred bucks.
Illustrator 5.0 (so numbered because it goes beyond the capabilities of Illustrator 4.0 for Windows) addresses all but one of its predecessor’s deficiencies — strangely, it still can’t import TIFF images — and adds enough new features to boggle the mind. It even has a few capabilities from Deneba’s Canvas, a savvy acknowledgment of the popularity of the midrange graphics package.
Playing Catch-up
Many of Illustrator 5.0’s enhancements can be dismissed as pure catch-up functions. For example, FreeHand 1.0 lets you undo multiple operations, draw and edit objects in the preview mode, and create custom page sizes. Six years later, Adobe has included these features in Illustrator 5.0. It’s about time.
Other Illustrator catch-up functions go beyond the expected. The automated gradations, for example, thoroughly trounce those provided by FreeHand. Whereas a gradation in FreeHand is limited to two key colors — one at the beginning and one at the end — Illustrator permits as many as 32 key colors per gradation. You can also set the position of the midpoint between key colors to create accelerating and decelerating blends, impossible in FreeHand. You can even drag with a Photoshop-like gradient-fill tool to specify the orientation of a gradation inside a selected shape and position the hot spot of a radial fill independently of the gradation’s center, a function utterly unique to Illustrator.
Illustrator 5.0 may be the last object-oriented program on earth to introduce independent drawing layers, but the quality and flexibility of its controls make the program special. Like most programs, Illustrator lets you hide and lock layers by clicking inside the floating Layers palette. But Illustrator lets you assign each layer its own color. When you select one or more objects, Illustrator colors the points and segments in the objects with the colors of the layers on which the objects sit. There’s no guesswork; you immediately know which objects go with which layers. Moving objects between layers has also been simplified. A small square next to a layer name in the Layers palette represents all selected objects on that layer. To move the objects to a different layer, just drag the square. What could be easier?
Like Photoshop, Canvas, QuarkXPress, and others, Illustrator supports plug-in modules. As in Photoshop, plug-ins manifest themselves as commands in the Filter menu. But while this makes sense in Photoshop because all filters change an image in prescribed increments, Illustrator’s plug-in modules run the gamut, enabling you to create shapes; manipulate objects; search and replace text characters; and perform other, equally unrelated operations.
Perhaps most exciting is the Pathfinder module, which lets you merge objects to create complex paths, much like the Combine commands in Canvas and Aldus IntelliDraw. To create a crescent, for example, you use one circle to take a bite out of another. You can combine two objects into a single outline, use one path to crop another (similar to masking), or fill the area where two objects overlap with an intermediate color so the front object appears translucent. The downside is that it requires a math coprocessor (FPU), which rules out many LC, Ilsi, and Centris 610 users.
Other modules — none of which require an FPU — let you draw stars and regular polygons, select objects according to stroke and fill, assign arrowheads to a line (another sorely needed function), clean up stray points, smooth out or rough up the perimeter of a path, double the amount of points in a path, and convert the boundaries of a stroke to paths. You can align objects, a staple of absolutely every draw program (except Illustrator) since MacDraw 1.0.
Not everything in Illustrator is hunky-dory, however. Unlike every other object-oriented program. Illustrator can only import images saved in the inefficient EPS format; there’s no support for TIFF, PICT, or JPEG. You still have no control over the placement of background templates, which invariably display as black and white. You still can’t scale a shape by dragging on its corner handle, a nearly universal operation among graphics programs. Illustrator 5.0 lacks a Revert command, so you have to close a document, decline to save it, and reopen it if you make a mistake. And there’s no automatic trapping option as in FreeHand, though the documentation devotes several pages to manual trapping techniques.
Most of these problems are minor. Illustrator has always been the most dependable draw program on the Mac. Now it’s also the most powerful. The next version of FreeHand has its work cut out for it.
McClelland, Deke. (November 1993). Illustrator 5.0. Macworld. (pg. 50).
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a-illustrator-501.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
