Illustrator VS Freehand (halftones)

[Vitaminado]

One of the features i love most in Freehand its the abillity to control Halftones...thats how we see the difference between a really pro oriented software and the rest!

[Sally]

Illustrator V Freehand

I posted this topic on the Adobe Illustrator Forum about a week ago. Makes for interesting reading! http://forums.adobe.com/message/3680453#3680453

[Vitaminado]

Even when I try to print a job in a postcript film printer illustrator choice of resolutions and lpi it's a joke!!

In Freehand i choose other... and i pick the combination i want.

It's incredible that i have search a lot of forums about Freehand vs Illustrator and no one talks about halfone's!!

One of the most interesting features of Freehand, the hability to choose several lines, types of dots and angles in a single job.

It's not a fight between two programs most of us use them booth and sometimes even other's like Corel. As a prepress professional, designer (i don't know if i can call myself "designer" i don't have a degree in Design) i use several programs but i create or redo my work in Freehand and i love it for it's simplicity, as i love photoshop for its image editing capabilities.


When i began working in this "art", we didn't even talk about graphic software, the only software was to write text that then was photographed and put to film. Then appeared Freehand and Illustrator, and the choice was simple Freehand all the way since 1991 (i think).

[FFH Mark]

[Vitaminado]

[trevor]

Now that work is upgrading my Mac (and hence Lion) I am in trouble. I have thousands of freehand files. I have tried opening in Illustrator CS5 and a number of errors occur which frightens me. Text blocks cut off and as a forms designer painfully checking every text block is tedious. It potentially adds a lot of time and or releasing forms with errors.

Halftones are critical to me. As a professional I select plate resolutions for screens on the forms. I also use screens to note particular areas. So a form may 10% Black 45 degrees 150lpi. Another shaded area may have 8% 0 degree 99 lpi. on the same form.

As I also do highly secure documents (i.e. Certificates, Bank Cheques and design money) there is complex embedded halftones in the artwork.

Illustrator seems to NOT be able to do any of these things. I am in tears!! and very frightened.

[Monika Gause]

The cutting off text objects is caused by Illustrators text handling. It converts any FreeHand text to area text, which is often a disadvantage. You can convert area text to point text using scripts. Find appropriate scripts here: www.kelsocartography.com/scripts

As for the handling of halftones, take a look at the plugin Phantasm CS. It creates vector based halftones at your chosen resultion settings. Since these are applied as effects, you can change anything afterwards. The plugin does a couple of other interesting things in the handling of color, especially spot color and separation. Find information here: www.astutegraphics.com