FreeHand Graphics Studio 7

The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
FreeHand Graphics Studio 7
Bob Burt
bobburt@melbpc.org.au

Full features and flexibility in Freehand" provides an alliterative reference to at least some of the major benefits of this release. FreeHand Graphics Studio 7 (FGS7) is a substantial illustration package which generates simple designs with ease and yet provides all the major elements required by graphics professionals.

The package

Now the property of Macromedia Inc, FGS7 is provided on five CD-ROMs, accompanied by seven substantial manuals

Figure 1. Creating a figure in a character set

Figure 2. Using FreeHand to prepare a logo outline

FGS7 comes with 10,000 clipart images, 500 fonts, 500 FreeHand templates, 250 MB of high-resolution photographs and many 3D models.

Using the suite

If you are a newcomer, you will find the tutorials provided in the manuals most helpful. The major one in the Getting Started manual is carefully designed so that you use, in sequence, Fontographer, FreeHand, Extreme 3D and xRes to create one 3D logo image in colour and then use FreeHand again to prepare a letterhead, incorporating the logo.

The package comes with version 1 of Extreme 3D, but you are provided with a card to post to the Australian distributors and obtain, without cost, version 2 of the product, which I have confirmed is now available from them. Unfortunately, the new version had not arrived at the time of writing. As the tutorial assumes you hold version 2, I have not completed the 3D tutorial for preparing the logo. All the other steps worked fine, though.

Online tutorials are available from the CD-ROMs for both FreeHand and Extreme 3D, providing the basic usage of each of these 32-bit applications.

FreeHand

This is the key package to the suite. It is an object-oriented drawing application that makes good use of tool panels, which float on top of the pasteboard and can be placed anywhere you wish. It is equipped with a main toolbar to trigger the most common operations, a text toolbar to accommodate, predictably, the main text commands, and an info bar to provide data on selected objects and page rulers.

Your illustrations are entered into a document page, although you can marshal and modify objects on the pasteboard outside it in a similar manner to Adobe PageMaker. Multiple pages are accommodated and, unusually, you can create a range of pages of different sizes within the one document.

Figure 3. Using xRes to add "noise" to the textured logo

Figure 4. Preparing a letterhead, incorporating the logo

FreeHand is well equipped for the creation of vector-based designs and has a vast range of tools to do the job. These include a small army of plug-ins, called Xtras, and support for a good range of non-vector (bitmap) formats. Some of the newer items include effects tools like enveloping, roughen and bend. FreeHand integrates smoothly with the major competitive graphics applications and for the most part will accept their native file formats.

Particular attention has been paid to providing the resources to design and produce Web graphics images. Illustra-tions can be saved in the vector formats Flash (.SWF) and Shockwave (.FHC).

Unlimited layering is provided and there are 100 levels of undo and redo.

I found the text creation and handling resources quite impressive. You can work with text as objects, of course, so it can be modified at will, converted to paths, attached to paths, coloured and textured. More advanced features include scaling the text horizontally without changing the height, altering the percent-age spacing between words, keeping selected words or lines together, applying and editing paragraph margins, creating columns and rows and even creating tables and forms. Although text can be edited directly on screen, a text editor is built in to make the job easier when text is small or dimly lit. Although an A4 document page is normally shown at 46% full size, you can control magnifi-cation to display from 6% to 6400% of normal size, so you could easily avoid using the editor if you so wished.

Despite the presence of features common to most top-class graphics packages, such as a toolbox with standard drawing and transform tools, there are many unique approaches to the more complex graphics-modification features. For example, colour handling is controlled by processes and sequences that differ from those available in CorelDRAW. Further, blends are created with a command rather than a tool. The manual Using FreeHand contains a useful quick guide to the more obvious procedural differences between FreeHand and its major competitors, intended to assist a newcomer familiar with a rival package, rather than to flaunt the advantages of FreeHand. In many cases the changes are clearly beneficial.

Figure 5. Extreme 3D

Figure 6. Using the Extreme 3D Access disc

Fontographer

This specialised graphics program is a very powerful typography editor. Its apparently simple interface belies the extensive range of precision tools available to create and edit fonts. You can generate and modify PostScript Type 1, Type 3, TrueType and Multiple Master fonts and import and export TrueType fonts and EPS files.

You can create a complex design with FreeHand or any other vector or bitmap graphics program and import the design into Fontographer, trace it if it is a bit-map, manipulate its size and shape if required and enter it in place of a letter in an existing font set or create a special font set to accommodate a large range of such images.

You can also create font families, adjust spacing and hinting, blend two fonts together and print samples of fonts, keyboard layouts and kerning pairs.

There are some intriguing specialised features. For example, you can create a series of stroked characters (which you must save as PS Type 3 fonts) and generate calligraphic characters directly from them with four quick automatic steps. Alternatively, you can use the freehand drawing tool directly as a calligraphic pen. Of course, a pressure-sensitive pen and digitising tablet is likely to give better results than a simple mouse.

Here again, the manual, in this instance Using Fontographer, is of great assistance. In addition to detailing the procedures for using all the tools and commands in the application, there is an extensive chapter entitled Expert Advice which provides valuable background information. If, for example, you don't know what a hint is in the context of fonts, this chapter explains it all for you.

xRes

Designed to create and edit images, xRes, like FreeHand, has a main toolbar to hold icons for the most used commands and floating panels (that display windows), inspectors (that provide information) and palettes. The creative tools include artistic brushes, Xtra (plug-in) support, floating text objects and a gradient designer. Unlike most other image editors, xRes can quickly zoom, pan and edit large images. It also supports multiple undo levels, even with high resolution files.

xRes has been optimised for working with high resolution images. To assist in this, setting up the program includes the creation of a swap disk which xRes can use to edit documents. The required size of the swap disk depends on the number of undo levels you set (5 is a reasonable number) and the maximum image size. The tutorial for xRes includes creating five special effects by applying filters to a 28.5 MB image. These took only a few seconds to complete the process, rather than perhaps ten minutes without a swap disk. An image of this size requires a swap file of 340 MB or so. If you set the undo levels to the maximum of 20 and you are working on a 40 MB image, you will require a 1360 MB swap file. Usefully, you can add a secondary swap file if you have more than one hard disk installed and sufficient free space available. The size of the image and the disk space reserved for it are always shown in the bottom left corner of the image window.

xRes supports a range of file formats, including BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, LRG. MMI, PhotoCD, Photoshop 3.0, PICT, PNG, Scitex CT, TARGA and TIFF. xRes comes with a plug-in that enables you to convert images from any of these file formats to any other on the list.

New to this version, you can now use xRes to edit a bitmap in FreeHand. You start this process (on the first occasion) by doubleclicking the image in FreeHand, which brings up a dialog box and prompts you to select an application to use as the external editor. You choose xRes, whereupon xRes is started and a copy of the image appears in TIFF or LRG format for editing. Subsequent double-clicks on any bitmap image in FreeHand immediately start xRes with a copy of the image displayed.

You can create multi-layer collages from multiple bitmap images of any size.

The manual for xRes is very well presented and includes a detailed tutorial which leads you through setting up your work space, using filters, working with objects, creating a flower design by using paths, painting with xRes brushes, using masks and channels, compositing and creating brushes and textures.

Extreme 3D

This is the package for creating three-dimensional images with optional animation.

The default screen for Extreme 3D contains a tool palette and a window that displays a grid. The blank window area is the work-space and the grid area is the working plane. The latter frames your view of 3D objects and you can change the orientation to view any object from any angle.

The Quick Start manual for Extreme 3D provides excellent introductory exercises, allowing you to gain confidence in using the program by using tools, moving objects, modelling, animating, adding lights, applying materials and rendering. However, when you have completed the exercises, you have used only a small fraction of the possible effects that you can create, all fully detailed in the main manual, which is the most substantial of all the reference manuals for FGS7.

The spline-based modelling features allow you to create 3D models from 2D reference objects. You can also drag and drop profiles from FreeHand for conversion.

The Script Editor

Clearly of greater practical interest to the more advanced users, the Macromedia Script Editor has been devised to allow you to automate repetitive tasks in FreeHand 7. It requires more than a basic know-ledge of Java, the programming language used for, in this instance, the development of script Xtras. A set of sample scripts is included to provide samples of working code for users preparing their own plug-ins.

Shockwave and the Internet

Shockwave is Macromedia's software for viewing and modifying dynamic graphics for the World Wide Web. It comprises compression utilities and Xtras for FreeHand and xRes to reduce file size by about 50% and therefore decrease transmission time. It includes plug-ins and controllers for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer to enable interactive multimedia, sound and graphics.

In xRes, for example, you can publish and view a high resolution image on the Internet without having to download all the image, since Shockwave downloads just sufficient data for display at the selected zoom level.

In Extreme 3D you can create both still and animated 3D models for "shocked" Web sites. VRML2 is supported.

Shockwave enables you to pan and zoom an image from within your browser. Up-to-date information about Shockwave and xRes can be obtained from the Macromedia Web site.

Conclusion

This is a very impressive package. The manuals are clearly written, all of similar style, and the material they cover is extensive. Much tutorial help is given, via the Getting Started manuals and the training movies. This is important, because of the very wide range of features available. Time has not permitted me to examine them all, but all the processes which I did complete worked very smoothly and as expected. FGS7 is very suitable for both the keen amateur and the professional graphic artist.

Reprinted from the October 1997 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia