Many thousands of FreeHand users have spent the past few years wondering whether the product has a future and hoping that, one day, Adobe will either resume development or release the code to enable another party to step in and take over development of this excellent application.
Those who continue to use FreeHand do so because it’s powerful and flexible, whilst at the same time being highly intuitive and innately stable. True, it’s not perfect, and it needs a little polish these days. But it has no major shortcomings that affect its ability to get the job done with the greatest of ease and efficiency. It’s also a real pleasure to use, and after almost six years since Adobe took it over and withdrew development, FreeHand’s loyal following is not about to give up on this product and it’s future.
Over that same period, Adobe’s Illustrator—the only real alternative to FreeHand—has been under constant development. Illustrator is now a feature-packed drawing application that includes a remarkable number of complex new features, including perspective grids, advanced typographic control, multiple pages, a real-time ‘draw inside’ feature that creates clipping paths as you draw, real-time and preset stroke width control, the automatic adjustment of dashed strokes to suit the geometry of their path, full Adobe PDF output capability, integration with other Adobe applications, and many more novel and excellent facilities.
Adobe has even tried to accommodate FreeHand users by promoting Illustrator’s ability to process files originally created in FreeHand. A sensible move, being that there must be an incalculable number of FreeHand files out there, either in use right now or sitting in designers’ archives waiting to be called upon at some stage in the future.
So why do we still hear so much about FreeHand after all these years?
There is no doubt that Illustrator has become a powerful beast. But could it be that these latest developments have come at a cost? Illustrator CS5 is being reported as painfully slow, and subject to frequent crashing (although Adobe has attempted to address the latter with a recent patch). And even though Adobe hails Illustrator CS5 as the first version able to access more than 2 GB RAM (now 3 to 4 GB, depending on system configuration), users of the new version are nevertheless reporting frequent out-of-memory failures as Illustrator announces all too often that “The operation cannot complete because there isn’t enough memory (RAM) available”. And of course, it no longer runs on PowerPC Macs. Furthermore, despite Adobe’s claims of cross-compatibility, Illustrator still has problems opening FreeHand files without compromising their integrity.
It also has to be said that some of Illustrator’s latest features—for example, the ability to paste objects inside other objects, multiple pages in one file, and perspective grids—were actually available in FreeHand, six years ago (and, of course, still are).
But, for many users (and certainly those who have any experience with FreeHand), it seems that the real bugbear with Illustrator is not merely speed, compatibility or even stability. It’s more to do with intuition. Just ‘using’ Illustrator has always had the potential to make you feel like you’re wading through quicksand wearing an overcoat and lead boots: you know where you want to get to, but the harder you try, the deeper you go, and the more you feel like it’s time to stop and wonder whether all the effort is really to your advantage. By which time, that spark of creative inspiration has long since faded.
I’ve known even die-hard Illustrator users find it difficult to deny that Illustrator can be fiddly at least, and desperately frustrating at worst, particularly when working with highly complex files. Unfortunately, this lack of a truly intuitive interface persists even with Illustrator CS5. The recent sound of frustration from within Adobe’s customer base, driven by the increasing complexity of many of Adobe’s products and an associated reduction in daily productivity, is something that cannot be ignored.
Yet, there is no doubt that, in the hands of the highly experienced user, Illustrator CS5 remains an immensely powerful application, albeit that it requires a considerable amount of computing power to make it feasible for daily use. And, in spite of its shortcomings, it is perfectly rational for long-standing Illustrator users to steadfastly support their application of choice not least because, with FreeHand held hostage in the basement for the past six years, they have had no viable alternative to consider. Of course, like FreeHand users, they too require access to the many pieces of work they have produced in Illustrator over the years. In this, they also have no choice and therein lies the point.
Both FreeHand and Illustrator have many excellent qualities. But the real question is not one of ‘which is best’—it’s actually a question of ‘what is my choice?’ Everyone has a right to choose their tools; and nobody should be given licence to take away that right purely for their own gain. Not even Adobe. And certainly not where, after six years of development, Illustrator still falls a long way short of being a viable, working alternative to FreeHand for the many thousands of FreeHand users continuing to earn their livelihoods in the ways they have already chosen.
Both FreeHand and Illustrator users were once able to exercise this right of choice. But by refusing to support FreeHand’s ongoing development, Adobe is denying that right from every party. Hence, Adobe’s recent “We Love Choice” marketing campaign is something of an irony in itself.
But of more significance to Adobe’s own future must be the degree of frustration with Adobe’s latest offerings; for if this persists, it may not be just the FreeHand lobbyists of today that will eventually be demanding the return of their right to choose, but a much larger audience indeed.
— Nigel Jones, Director, Words and Publications, Oxford, UK
Nigel Jones has been in publications design since 1986. His company, Words and Publications, was founded in 1989 to provide a complete design, illustration, editorial, layout and printing service which includes foreign language translation and production service; hence the ‘Words’ in ‘Words and Publications’.
In the beginning, his company was using Aldus’ PageMaker for all layout work. They were also evaluating FreeHand and Illustrator at that time, and it was with FreeHand that they developed a technique involving the painstaking separation of the black and second colour elements of each FreeHand diagram onto separate layers, exporting each layer as a separate EPS file, and then subsequently aligning the resulting EPS files on top of each other within the PageMaker layout. By doing this they could actually ‘force’ PageMaker to output all black and colour elements onto separated film positives.
Later, it was the combination of FreeHand and QuarkXPress that became invaluable to the firm in producing lengthy, full colour, highly illustrated documents, often of a technical nature. FreeHand still enables Words and Publications to work quickly and efficiently with very few drawbacks, some 20 years later. Words and Publications
