Hi DeacInCola,
Thanks for sharing your experience. I am doing the same as you for a while,
more than 2 months now. I am a little luckier, I had someone in my office who
uses Illustrator, I could always ask him when ever I got into problem. It was
very confusing in the beginning, lots of questions about the control of the
fill and the stroke. They are together and yet they are not. When you want to
do changes to the stroke, you have click onto the stroke, not on the fill, even
those the fill and the stroke are together. Freehand user will find this
incredibly difficult to accept. To comments on whether illustrator is a good
software or better than FreeHand and without being bias, I must be a true
Illustrator user. I have done a project with it now, I missed Freehand "collect
for output", have to resort to using third party software like "Scoop" to do
the collecting. No doubt the Illustrator raster handling is much better. The
ability to use .psd file with transparency is great. I am still learning a very
difficult software. There are so many "Transform" function all over the place,
in fact there are many repeated functions everywhere. I only using those in
from the Effect function as they are editable. WHY make it so confusing.
Freehand is still much simpler, almost everything are editable. I am still
hoping. Thanks for being part of this.
Jack Png

Yes, Adobe. Please upgrade Freehand. It is too good a program to let die. It
fills the gap between InDesign and Illustrator perfectly and is so user
friendly. I keep dabbling in Illustrator and its always a case of 'select,
de-select, select, de-select - all the time!!!!!' Very frustrating. It takes 3
times as long to do the same thing in Illustrator as it does in Freehand.

regards, SpenBeck (freehand till it dies!)

YES PLEASE, YES . . . BECAUSE OF THE "LAST 15 YEARS WORK" EVERY DAY WITH FH

Been with Freehand since version 3. All other graphic software is too troublesome to use after being spoiled by Freehand. Definitely would continue to upgrade! - Karen W. Draughon

A simple way to make all freehand user move to illustrator would be to make all
the commands customisable, so freehand users could make illustrator behave like
freehand (user friendly).

Maybe a 'default freehand actions' in preferences.

Problem solved!

"Yes, I will upgrade my FreeHand MX with Adobe" Please, please, please, please,
please, please, please, please!
I use it everyday since Aldus Freehand 2.0 on Mac SE with 2 megs of ram. MX
runs great on Leopard with some quirks.

YES of course

YES of course

Yes, I would definitely pay. I think that Illustrator is fine for some tasks;
however, when it comes to doing map work, it really can't compare. What
software are other people using for cartographic projects?

Yes! In a heartbeat!