FreeHand MX in Broad Strokes

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The first thing you'll notice when you initially start FreeHand MX is the location of panels — what used to be known as palettes — along the right side of the screen. On a Windows machine, they snap in and out of your workspace as you need them. Individual panels can be removed and floated on the desktop and nested with other panels, regardless of platform. Then you're likely to notice that the Toolbox has been modified. Tools of a feather are nested together, and you have to hold the cursor down on one tool to open the group of tools that are available. Most of the Xtras have been grouped into the Toolbox as well. You'll also see a few new tools: Output Area, Extrude, Action, and Connector, to name a few. Beyond the abilities you're given with these new tools, the main thrust of the upgrade is the way you can have multiple strokes, fills, and effects on a single object. Draw an object once, and add squiggly lines, drop shadows, Gaussian blurs, and glows. Then do it again. Each attribute is added to an Object "tree" that you can edit by moving branches up and down the tree, or removing them altogether.

Gradient fills get a big boost, too. Any gradient fill can have one of three new modifiers applied to it that reflect, duplicate, or fit the object precisely. The gradient is editable directly within the document with a set of control handles that is new in FreeHand MX. Rounded corners on rectangles are definitely easier with the tricks the Subselect tool can do with a rectangle, and ellipses can have precise sections of their arcs removed. Polygons are editable beyond belief now. You can make changes in stars or straight-sided polygons live, on the object, or through modifications in the Object panel.

You can import a SWF file and make it part of your FreeHand page and then export the page with the SWF embedded in it. During all that, you can click a button to open Flash, where you can modify the SWF file. It's automatically updated in the FreeHand document.

There are too many new elements to mention so briefly. The following pages provide greater detail about everything that is available at the time of writing.

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