

- #FREEHAND PORTABLE UPGRADE#
- #FREEHAND PORTABLE SERIES#
- #FREEHAND PORTABLE FREE#
- #FREEHAND PORTABLE MAC#
- #FREEHAND PORTABLE WINDOWS#
This version of FreeHand has enough improvements to justify an upgrade or new purchase. When you open the Mirror dialog box, there are options to mirror an object any number of times around a center point. With the Mirror Xtra tool, it's a one-click operation to mirror objects on a horizontal or vertical axis. If you need a quick drop shadow, select the Shadow effect from the Xtra tool bar and double-click the Shadow tool icon to open a dialog box of shadowing options. There are controls to customize these, too. Emboss has preset options for standard, chisel, ridge and quilt embossing styles. Other new Xtras are the Emboss and Shadow effects. The Garden Hose brushes are not terribly exciting, but you can easily invent new ones.
#FREEHAND PORTABLE SERIES#
My favorite is the Graphic Hose, which paints a series of objects much as the Nozzle does in Fractal Design Painter from MetaCreations Corp. You can rotate an object or scale it horizontally, vertically or proportionally. Each object has transform handles for direct manipulation. You can customize the keyboard shortcuts or remap all of FreeHand's shortcuts to mimic those in other programs such as CorelDraw 7, Adobe Illustrator 7.0, or QuarkXpress 3.3 or 4.0.Īnother interface improvement shows up in the interactive transforms. Tool bars can be docked to the sides or top of the screen or can stay as free-floating panels. You vary the area affected by pressing and holding the left or right arrow keys.įreeHand's interface is easy to customize by adding, removing or rearranging the buttons and fields on the main tool bar, the info bar and the text bar. The smart cursor changes to a pointer with a squiggly line to indicate a pull operation or a pointer with a small circle to indicate a push operation. New users will find it more intuitive than the usual Bezier controls. The Magnify lens can reflect all changes made in the original drawing, or you can select the snapshot option and lock the view in place.Īnother new item in the FreeHand toolbox is a Freeform tool, which pulls or pushes areas along a path. Another useful effect is the Magnify lens, which applies a variable zoom view to any area. One is dynamic transparency for objects that are in editable vector format.įreeHand's Fill Inspector lets you set transparency attributes such as shape, location, opacity and color. And Insta.HTML exports the FreeHand pages in Hypertext Markup Language.Īlthough FreeHand 7.0 was certainly full-featured, Version 8 has even more goodies. Flash adds animation, interactive components, sounds and size optimization.

Design in Motion goes after the growing market for Web page design.įreeHand 8.0 is an excellent vector graphics program for illustration and multipage document creation. When Macromedia released FreeHand Graphics Studio, it competed against Corel Corp.'s popular CorelDraw suite. Like any high-end graphics program, it needs at least 24M of RAM to run effectively.
#FREEHAND PORTABLE WINDOWS#
The suite runs under Microsoft Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 or Apple System 7.1 or higher versions. Insta.HTML 2.0 is a FreeHand Xtra, similar to an Adobe Photoshop plug-in, and it occupies less than 1M. Not counting extra fonts and clip art, FreeHand 8.0 takes up about 32M of storage. Each program comes on its own CD-ROM and has a separate setup program. The new Design in Motion suite, of which FreeHand 8.0 is part, has other new components: Flash 2.0 and Insta.HTML 2.0. This time, the suite is Web-oriented.įreeHand 7.0 came bundled in the FreeHand Graphics Studio, which included xRes, Extreme 3D and Fontographer. once again has released a new suite with its upgraded FreeHand drawing program. For those of you who don't care about FreeHand and simply wish to have a tool for creating vector graphics, Illustrator will suffice.Macromedia Inc.
#FREEHAND PORTABLE FREE#
If you wish to see Adobe start developing the program again, there is a group called the Free FreeHand Organization that is petitioning to have it be continued. It also had many exporting options including the ability to export to HTML, Flash, and Photoshop documents. It utilized a graphic wand tool to quickly select objects and a lasso tool to select areas based on the user's selection.
#FREEHAND PORTABLE MAC#
It is still available to purchase in its final version for both Mac and Windows.įreeHand had many useful features that made it a powerful design tool. Its page layout and text formatting features made FreeHand useable for efficiently designing publications. Adobe discontinued development of the program soon after obtaining ownership of it in an attempt to transition FreeHand users over to Illustrator.įreeHand was commonly used by illustrators, publishers, and web content creators. Add symbols from a large library to your designĪdobe FreeHand was a vector graphic editing program similar to Illustrator, another Adobe program.Distort graphics and text with the envelope tool.Save projects as Photoshop documents with layers intact.
