I've used Freehand for years, primarily as a print/publishing tool to
assemble theatrical programs to hand out before performances for my
community theatre. These programs contain photos of cast members, bios,
ads, etc. These programs contain several pages that must be set up for
imposition for printing duplex.

It seems to me that if I were to upgrade to an Adobe product I should
be getting InDesign, which will supposedly do what I need it to do.
However, Adobe tells me that there is no upgrade path from Freehand to
InDesign...only to Illustrator. Does this make sense? I thought
Illustrator was primarily a vector graphics design program with little
print/publishing capabilities. Am I wrong? If so, what are the main
differences between InDesign and Illustrator as pertains to
print/publishing?

Thanks,

Charles Newbury

> differences between InDesign and Illustrator as pertains to
> print/publishing?

Illustrator is for, well, ilustration. I make book jackets with it but is there is more text involved I always use InDesign, which is a layout program with a few tools for vector graphics. YOu can of course make a page or two in Illustrator and import into InDesign - as ai files, noo need for exporting eps files.

> I've used Freehand for years, primarily as a print/publishing tool to
> assemble theatrical programs to hand out before performances for my
> community theatre. These programs contain photos of cast members, bios

If the programs have more than four pages this is clearly a job for InDesign and I would not use FreeHand. For good typography FreeHand has quite poor text controls and it still amazes me that people here regard them as good. Character styles and especially nested styles are worth checking out.

Jukka