I used to chastise professional drawing stalwarts FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator for not being aggressive enough with their upgrades. No more. In the past two years, both programs have changed substantially. If FreeHand 5.0 is any indication, the trend is hardly in decline.
Name a feature in Illustrator 5.5 that has been absent in FreeHand and you’re liable to find it in FreeHand 5. Among the many features no longer unique to Illustrator, you can now count custom guidelines, multiple-color gradients, external special-effects options, multiple views of a document, text search and a spelling checker, one-key cloning, color-modification controls, and object-specific trapping. FreeHand 5 also throws in its own unique features, including tab leaders, style sheets, and better object slicing.
FreeHand 5’s interface, however, remains as awkward and bulky as that of its predecessor. FreeHand 4 users will probably feel right at home, hut I doubt if people who shied away from that version will be any happier with version 5. Oh sure, now and then the new FreeHand makes an effort to bring old users into the fold. For example, you can now choose to edit text either directly on the page or inside a dialog box, and you can hide the annoying text ruler. But the overall picture remains one of a program ready to hurst at the seams, with 13 palettes and more than twice as many dialog boxes as in version 4. If you avoided FreeHand 4, prepare yourself for a substantial learning curve. The good news is that this time the payoff is even bigger.
FreeHand Extends Its Reach
Like Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and others, FreeHand now supports external modules — which it calls Xtras — that add functions to the program. It can even use your Illustrator plug-in filters; just make aliases for them and place them in the Xtras folder. In my testing, the only Illustrator filters that didn’t work inside FreeHand 5 were the automatic-selection functions. Best of all, FreeHand’s Xtras are accelerated for Power Macs (Illustrator’s filters run in the slower emulated mode in FreeHand).
In Illustrator, plug-ins always appear as commands under the Filter menu, but Xtras can manifest either as tools or commands. The tools are generally successful, allowing you to draw spirals and distort selected objects by dragging inside the drawing area. (Illustrator forces you to negotiate inside static dialog boxes.) Among the Xtras is the 3-D rotation tool, which lets you spin objects in three-dimensional space; you define the perspective and horizon point before using the tool. To use the fish-eye lens tool, you draw an ellipse that represents the shape of the lens; FreeHand distorts the object around it. You can’t preview the fish-eye effect during the drag, hut the effect is quick and reliable. The only disappointment is the smudge tool, which creates a blend from a selected shape to a specified color. For some reason, you can’t modify the number of steps in the smudged object the way you can in a blend.
Though FreeHand’s Xtra tools all reside in a single palette, the Xtra commands are slightly less predictable. Some appear only in the Xtras menu, others appear both in die Xtras menu and as buttons in the Operations palette. This duplication wouldn’t matter if FreeHand 5 didn’t mix in a few non-Xtras just to make life confusing. The Blend command, for example, is now available as a command in the Path Operations submenu, as a button in the Operations palette, and as yet another command under the Xtras menu — and it’s not even an external module; it’s built into the FreeHand application. I suppose the intention is to make Blend (and ten similarly thrice-featured non-Xtras in the program) easier to find, but in practice it makes the program’ bulkier and harder to navigate. Microsoft Word and Excel also duplicate commands as buttons, but in those programs you can customize the buttons to fit your work habits, something I wish FreeHand offered.
Color Me Pleased as Punch
FreeHand 5 includes several new fill and stroke functions that handily outperform their Illustrator counterparts. For example, the Xtra eyedropper tool lifts colors from objects as well as from imported TIFF images. This means you can create entire color libraries from a single 24-bit photograph. Illustrator imports EPS images only, and neither it nor FreeHand can lift colors from this format.
FreeHand’s attribute styles have been modified so you can define styles that affect just the fill, just the stroke, or both. This is the first time since FreeHand 2 that you can name fills and strokes independently. If styles aren’t your bag, you can simply copy the fill and stroke attributes from one object and use keyboard shortcuts to immediately apply them to another object.
FreeHand now automatically names colors when you add them to the Color List palette. And if you find dragging colors is too much work, you can choose Name All Colors, a helpful Xtra, to name and list all colors applied to objects in your document.
Finally, FreeHand 5’s Color Controls dialog box lets you adjust the colors applied to selected objects. For example, to convert a full-color drawing to gray scale, just decrease the Saturation setting to 0. You can also tint objects, lighten or darken them, and displace colors around the hue wheel. When you’re finished, you can turn around and automatically add your new colors to the Color List palette. This is the first time I’ve seen a colormanipulation command like this outside an image-editing application.
If all of FreeHand were this good, I’d have no complaints. Unfortunately, one color Xtra, Multi-Color Fill, falls short of the mark. Although it lets you assign gradient fills with as many as 64 key colors — Illustrator limits you to 32 — MultiColor Fill leaves a lot to be desired. For starters, the feature isn’t integrated into FreeHand’s existing two-color gradient function. This means you can’t drag and drop colors into a multicolor gradient or lift colors with the eyedropper tool. In fact, a multicolor gradient isn’t a true fill at all. The gradient doesn’t update to accommodate reshaped or joined paths... Also, you can’t transform the object independently of its fill without first ungrouping, and the gradient replaces any objects previously pasted inside the mask without warning. Finally, you can’t name multicolor gradients, as you can in Illustrator, nor can you copy them from one object and apply them to another.
Type on the March
FreeHand’s type-specification options are still scattered throughout two palettes and several panels as before, but now you can bypass these controls by establishing fully functioning paragraph styles, like those in a word processor. When you edit a style sheet, FreeHand presents you with all character and paragraph attributes — typeface, leading, tabs, paragraph spacing, even color — inside a single dialog box. As in FreeHand 4, you can apply style sheets either by selecting the text and then a style, or by dragging a style and dropping it onto any text in the document, whether selected or not.
FreeHand 5 also provides a spelling checker and a search-and-replace function. You can’t search by style or automatically replace straight quotes with curly ones and make other “smart” punctuation adjustments, as in Illustrator 5.5. But I think most FreeHand users will manage to forgive these oversights when they find they can now hide and display the text ruler. Personally, I prefer Illustrator’s free-floating tab ruler — which you can stretch and move at will, and which provides drop-down lines to more clearly demonstrate alignment — but FreeHand 5 is alone in offering tab leaders (as well as the wrapping tab stop introduced in FreeHand 4). Though I’d still like to see master pages and automatic page numbering, most users will likely prefer FreeHand over either PageMaker or QuarkXPress for creating small, design-intensive documents.
There’s much more to praise in the new FreeHand. I haven’t mentioned how you can magnify a drawing to a scale of 256 to 1, close enough to see the sweat on a fly. Nor have I mentioned how you can option-drag to clone objects, even while scaling or rotating; slice objects in free-form swipes with the knife tool; or hide and display palettes from the keyboard. You can also position objects on the Guide layer to serve as custom guides, though you can’t reshape them while they’re in the guide layer, nor can composite paths serve as guides, both disadvantages when compared with Illustrator. Meanwhile, the new trapping Xtra functions almost exactly like Illustrator’s.
The Last Word
All in all, this is the most impressive FreeHand to date. Granted, its interface needs some restructuring, and a few Xtras feel as if they were thrown in to help bolster a features list. And Illustrator 5.5 still provides better gradients, mask editing, custom guide control, scaling and rotating, graphing, and screen management. But FreeHand is the faster program — especially when it comes to text and Xtras — and it wins in die key areas of navigation, object blending, schematic drawing, color management, text handling, small-document creation, and special effects. In fact — and it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say this — if I had to recommend only one draw program, it would be FreeHand.
McClelland, Deke. (May 1995). Macromedia FreeHand 5.0. Macworld. (pgs. 56-57).
Macromedia, Inc.
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FreeHand_5.0.x.sit_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
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