This has been a sticking point for me over the last few years. From the early days of my Design life, both at university and during the initial years of my employed life I used Macromedia Freehand. I was trained on it and used it on a daily basis… and now it’s gone. I have made the transition to Illustrator fairly easily and although I can use it for most things that I used Freehand for I am always left thinking “I could do this with less fuss with Freehand”.
I had expected that over time Adobe would incorporate some of the more useful aspects of Freehand in Illustrator, the most obvious being the support for multiple page documents, which I find Illustrator sadly lacking in. With Freehand I could make a multiple page document and have each page a different size and have them all visible on the same canvas, so I could mock-up a design for a stationery set and see them all at the same time on the same canvas… not even Quark allows for this.
The advanced path tools were far superior in Freehand, and I fear the days of simply being able to paste an image, path or group inside another are long lost. I now have to contend with Illustrator’s unexpected results from making a clipping mask. Punching holes in filled shapes are now less of a formality and more of a game of roulette trying to guess whether Illustrator will actually do what you asked, or come up with it’s own interpretation of a Picasso masterpiece with unexpected extra paths added on!
Come on Adobe… smarten yourself up, you have the technology to make your industry leading software the top of the pile forever… and you have it sitting in a vault somewhere gathering dust.
I suspect I’m not the only one who keeps a copy of Freehand MX safely tucked away in my applications folder… for when Illustrator simply fails to make the grade.
