Well it finally happened. Adobe has killed Freehand. Everyone is expected to migrate to Illustrator (for a “small” $199 fee). Interesting enough Adobe will still sell Freehand, making things very confusing.
I did some of my first cartography on Freehand many years ago, but I haven’t used it since about version 7.
6 responses so far ↓
1
Chad
// May 17, 2007 at 7:04 am
I always prefered Freehand over Illustrator myself… but it has been a while since I have used either.
2
carlos
// May 17, 2007 at 8:43 am
At my workplace, we use Freehand extensively to create a bunch of map packages year after year. We heard about this coming and are cringing the day where we have to migrate all our work to Illustrator.
Why? Freehand lets you have several pages in one file. It’s my understanding that you have to use Adobe InDesign that links to several seperate Illustrator files. Sounds like a real pain-in-the-ass to me.
Anyone out there made the migration? Freehand is nice in that it’s more simple to use than Illustrator.
3
James Fee
// May 17, 2007 at 9:10 am
The hardest thing for me when I had to switch from Freehand to Illustrator was the single page per file. I loved that part of Freehand.
CS3 allows page tiling that simulates multiple pages per file.
4
Paul Petersen
// May 17, 2007 at 10:17 am
I love InDesign and use it to blend together ArcMap .pdf exports, custom Illustrator artwork, and Photoshop files. It is very easy to make a great-looking final map layout with InDesign. That being said, it’s a very different product than Illustrator, as you can’t actually edit the files; rather it just serves as a repository of linked files. For what it’s made for, it’s pretty slick, but there’s a lot it doesn’t do.
5
Bryan
// May 17, 2007 at 10:55 am
I completed work on a small atlas recently and fell in love with InDesign. Once you understand the workflow it’s very powerful.
I would layout the map frames in ArcGIS with all my symbology and annotation, export to PDF, tweak what I needed in Illustrator, and then glue it all together in InDesign.
The concept of master pages is particularly useful when you have repeating elements on each page (grid numbers, north arrows, page numbers, etc).
Also the table layout features are great. I wrote a geoprocessing script that intersects my map grid with various features and creates an InDesign snippet that I can use to update my index whenever we add or change features on the map.
Try that with ESRI PLTS!
6
giasen
// May 18, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Anybody have any work samples floating around? I have been using ArcGIS & CS2. But I did get a healthy dose of Freehand in college… along with Idrisi…
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