Yes, I will upgrade my FreeHand MX with Adobe.

FreeHand user since 1990
Hlynur Olafsson

Yes, We've 5 versions waiting for upgrading...
FH user since 1990 - version 2 !!!!!

FreeHand is great - I'll never "downgrade" to Illustrator !!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, an upgrade or just a bugs fix with the last Leopard! I just buy CS3 but I can't work with Illustrator or InDesign.
Please, save Freehand, the best app I have never used.

YES! YES! YES!

Nina

No I would not pay.

I learnt both Freehand, Illustrator and Quark back when the software easily
fit on floppy disks (more about that in a moment). In response to the dinosaurs
who have been with Freehand from the near beginning and will not shift, I must
point out the obvious ? Freehand as a product is very bad as it falls between
two goals: it is neither a good drawing program, nor is it a good layout
program.

Part of my training in graphic design was learning that specilisation in
software is key as it enables the product to do what it does best. Illustrator
always has been fantastic for graphics and illustrations, just as Quark was
(and still is, up to a point) fantastic at layout and type.

The con sold by Macromedia was that you could do everything in Freehand. No
you could not, not professionally any way. It was a cheap alternative to the
heavyweights, better value for money possibly, quicker to learn than 2 separate
programs definitely, but not a superior program. Is Freehand an illustration
program with a DTP emulator or a DTP program with a graphics emulator?

I remember an argument occurring once between a lecturer friend and her boss
about what software should be bought and taught...it was settled by opening the
media pages and counting the instances of when they were mentioned.
Illustrator, Quark and Photoshop were on almost every ad. Freehand got about
10% of the ads, at best. The older dinosaurs among you will point out some
industry wide conspiracy towards hugging Adobe products but it's not true...it
is simply that professionals follow their own path and collectively it led them
towards towards the "industry-standard" Illustrator.

Illustrator has many faults, it is buggy especially with activating fonts and
it is horridly large, installing a great deal of crap onto my system that I
neither want, need nor asked for. It also is trying to do too much (such as
tighter integration of raster graphic which are causing headaches when going to
press) and not fixing basic problems such why is the launch and quit damn slow.
Nevertheless it proves itself daily with it's drawing tools and manipulation of
paths.

Look at the latest versions of Quark and Illustrator and there corresponsing
drawing tools (Quark) and layout tools (Illustrator) and they both suck, as the
americans say. However the layout tools (Quark) and drawing tools (Ilustrator)
continue to lead (perhaps not Quark, but this is not the forum for that).
Freehand MX is still inbetween two aims and has fallen by the wayside.

Updating old Freehand files has been essential as there have been many notable
flaws with Freehand files that have recently (last couple of years) come to
light, most notably with Pantone colours using the wrong denomination,
incorrect production of gradients, mis-leading previews from legacy files and
copy-heavy spreads not printing at all.

Staying with Freehand for me wasn't an option. It wasn't good to start with
and has yielded more problems as software in general has moved on.

> The con sold by Macromedia was that you could do everything in Freehand. No
> you could not, not professionally any way. It was a cheap alternative to the

Very true. Finally someone said it here.

> always has been fantastic for graphics and illustrations, just as Quark was
> (and still is, up to a point) fantastic at layout and type.

I've heard many times Quark is aimed to professionals but have not yet figured out what the profession actually is. Last version I've used (professionally) is probably 3. At that time PageMaker was considered as inferior program and in some respect like in production reliability it really was. But with very modest controls it sure kicked Quark's ass in producing well spaced justified body text, especially in narrow magazine column.

PageMaker and Aldus were both Aldus's products and they have very sililar text controls. But surprisingly in PageMaker they do work much better than in FreeHand.

Jukka

> PageMaker and Aldus were both Aldus's products

PageMaker and FreeHand of course.

Jukka

Hi Casper,
Thanks for sharing your experience with all the guys here watching this topic.
I ask you to remember that FreeHand was left in the cold if we can still
remember for how long... it has been a long long time. To compare it with
Illustrator CS3 now. The only thing I would give it to Illustrator is it
ability to handle raster effect much better than FreeHand MX can. But when it
comes to Speed, Object handling, the way designers use the software, we call it
"user friendly" Freehand after all these years without a proper upgrade is
still a better software. This is only my opinion as a software user since 1990.
No software is perfect, only better or worse.
Cheers
Jack

I'd pay in a second. Recently tried an entire week end to create my work in AI and tore hair out and gave up -- its awful.

Yes. I will definitely upgrade my Freehand MX

cjkauf