by Intheshop » Thu Oct 13, 2016 8:32 pm
I use both Win7 and MacOS. I have both machines in my home office and have used both at work. Lots of newspapers went Windows in the early 2000s but I kept my Mac at home. Then when the Mac OS no longer ran Freehand 9, I switched to a Windows7 machine at home.
As for production, I do the drawing and layout in Freehand 9. Then I export the artwork as a jpeg -- do as needed in Photoshop. Then export the text as a Illustrator 3 file. Import text into Illustrator CS6 and update. The text does not shatter. Then bring in the jpeg to put in the back of the text. Make final adjustments in Illustrator and good to go.
As long as people can edit the text they are happy. It also makes it less likely that someone will take the vector art since it is flattened into a jpeg -- lots of guys won't bother trying to change the jpeg around. A decade ago when my vector work was being sent to clients via newspaper syndicates, I had people take my vector work apart, re-arrange it and put their name on it. Nice.
Why do I like Freehand 9 the best? It is the ideal combination of features and ease of use (IMHO). The feature set was strong (it had 15 things that Illustrator did not have in 2000)... I liked customizing keyboard shortcuts, transparency fills, auto trace, etc. But it still retained a directness I liked. One or two clicks and an operation was done. To do the same thing in Illustrator took 5 clicks. The way Illustrator needlessly complicated layering and selection... how Illustrator tried so hard to integrate with its Adobe cousins -- all made it more laborious to use. What I do is more straight up vector work -- not a lot of need to integrate with pixels or filters.
Now let me say Illustrator has come a long way in the last 10 years... it does not annoy me quite as much as it did long ago. But with thousands of Freehand files in my archives and only another 5+ years of work to go before retiring to the beach, my Freehand love affair is strong.
I will keep checking on the updates to other vector programs so hope springs eternal.
Cheers,
SCOTT