Use FreeHand MX for creative design, storyboarding, multipage document production, and editing with an unparalleled set of creative design tools. Easily repurpose your designs for print, the Internet, or Macromedia Flash.
Multiple Attributes
Add more visual punch to your designs and illustrations—apply unlimited stroke, fill, and effect attributes to a single vector or text object while maintaining editability of the base object. Multiple attributes eliminate the need to stack duplicates of an object to create a particular appearance, making updates easier, faster, and with fewer objects to manage.
You can even build attributes on top of groups and symbols, making it fast and easy to apply such visual effects as blurs and drop shadows to entire sections of a design at once.
Live Effects
Maximize creative expression with live effects, which apply complex distortions and effects without altering the original object. FreeHand MX includes such vector effects as bend, sketch, and transform—as well as bevel, drop shadow, and gradient transparency raster effects. The Object panel allows you complete control over effects, as well as to all or selected object attributes.
Live-Edit Graphic Primitives
Quickly and easily reshape rectangles, ellipses, and polygons while maintaining the control and editability of FreeHand MX graphic primitives. You can easily round rectangle corners or mix them concave or convex, convert ellipses to arcs, and change polygons to stars with an editable numbers of points.
Image Alpha-Channel Support
Support for alpha channels allows you to seamlessly integrate images containing transparency into your designs. FreeHand MX provides full import and display support of 32-bit image formats.
Vector Transparency
FreeHand MX was the first high-end, PostScript-based drawing program to offer true, dynamic transparency capabilities while preserving documents in an editable vector format. Transparent lenses are one of the standard fill types available in FreeHand MX.
You can set transparency attributes, such as shape, location, opacity, and color. Dynamically change the opacity and color fill of an object to reveal objects behind the lens-filled object. Or show transparency effects only in the overlapping object areas.
Perspective Grid
FreeHand MX offers the best way to represent 3D media in a 2D drawing environment. The perspective grid puts your artwork into perspective in seconds: just set up background-perspective grid-guides with infinitely adjustable vanishing points and horizon lines, allowing for 3D effects in a familiar illustration environment.
Snap any vector object to the grid, creating accurate perspective views. Objects automatically scale as they are moved toward the vanishing points, and change perspective as you move them up and down the grid. Once objects are attached to the grid, you can change the grid layout and perspective, automatically updating objects on the grid to match the new perspective.
Interactive Transforms
With FreeHand MX, you can use object-based handles to rotate, scale, skew, or move graphics directly, without having to select different tools for each transform. To bring up interactive transform handles, simply double-click any object or selection of multiple objects with the Pointer tool. When you’ve finished your move, double-click again to turn the transform handles off.
Action Tool
Easily assign complex Macromedia Flash ActionScript navigation commands. Just drag and drop a link between objects, symbols, and pages to quickly produce click-throughs for client approval, presentations, and sophisticated Macromedia Flash projects.
Assign such simple actions as Go To and Play or Go To and Stop or more complex behaviors like Get URL or Load External Movie.
SWF Import / Reexport
Now you can import more complex Macromedia Flash movies (SWFs) into your FreeHand MX document and integrate them into your designs before exporting back out to SWF. Great for developing larger site interfaces and designs in FreeHand MX while still being able to include components that include more programming-intensive functions for e-commerce, video streaming, or Flash Communications.
Launch and Edit with Macromedia Flash
Work more productively between programs with a launch-and-edit workflow between FreeHand MX and Macromedia Flash. SWFs placed in a FreeHand MX document can be edited in Macromedia Flash with a click in the Object panel. Updates made to the FLA file in Macromedia Flash are automatically applied to the SWF placed in FreeHand MX.
FreeHand MX Importer for Macromedia Flash
Macromedia Flash can now open and import FreeHand MX files while preserving the editability of vectors and text—and streamline the production process as projects move from design to development and programming.
Navigation Panel
Use the Navigation panel to assign navigation action to objects for export to HTML or Macromedia Flash. The Navigation panel streamlines your workflow by letting you apply Internet links and Macromedia Flash actions to graphics and text from within FreeHand MX.
For Macromedia Flash production, use the panel to assign event handlers, actions, and parameters. Available actions include Go To and Stop, Go To and Play, Get URL, Play and Stop, Print, Full Screen, Start/Stop Drag, Load/Unload Movie, and Tell Target.
Create Print Layouts for Macromedia Flash
Create rich web-native print applications for printing from Macromedia Flash Player within any browser. FreeHand MX and Macromedia Flash offer a technology that bridges the Internet and printers with web-native applications that have screen and print components. Lay out rich print designs in the flexible multipage FreeHand MX environment, and import into Macromedia Flash to create compelling cross-media applications.
Master Pages
Master pages help you speed layout and production workflow, maintain consistency across a design, and revise common layout elements across an entire project with a single edit. Master pages are as great for use in multipage print projects as they are in other common page-layout applications, but you can also use them for Macromedia Flash MX project backgrounds and click-through presentations for client approval.
FreeHand MX lets you define a virtually unlimited number of master pages in any document. Master pages can be applied to or removed from any page at any time in your design process. They can even be stored in Symbol libraries and shared across multiple documents.
Multipage Environment
The unique FreeHand MX multipage environment allows you to complete more of your design and production in a single document. No more designing your project parts in multiple single-page documents that you not only has to manage, but also open individually. With multiple pages, you can create multiple concepts of a design for a customer—or letterhead, envelope and business card designs—all in the same file, so you only need to send one file to the printer.
FreeHand MX also offers intuitive page management, so you can streamline the production of anything from website storyboards to graphic-intensive brochures. With the Page tool, you can work with pages directly on the pasteboard as you do with objects—and move, resize, and duplicate pages without opening the Document inspector.
Connector Lines Tool
Quickly map information architecture, data flows, and site maps with the Connector Lines tool. Just drag the tool to assign persistent relationships between objects.
Connector Line Styles
Connector Line styles let you completely customize the look of connectors, as well as quickly apply various appearances to give them different meanings in your map. For example, a solid connector might represent the standard path through your site, while a dashed line connector might represent the path when a user hasn’t logged onto your site.
