FreeHand MX

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Some of you may have purchased Studio more recently or may have upgraded and have FreeHand MX instead of version 10. The first thing you'll notice when you start FreeHand MX is the location of panels, which used to be known as palettes, along the right side of the screen. They snap in and out of your workspace as you need them, and you can remove or float individual panels on the desktop. The Toolbox has also been modified. Tools of a feather are nested together, and you have to click and hold the cursor down on one tool to bring up the available group of tools. Most of the Xtras are grouped in 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 these new tools give you, the main thrust of the upgrade is the way you can apply multiple strokes, fills, and effects to 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 in the tree, or removing them altogether.

Gradient fills got a big boost, too. You can apply one of three new modifiers to any gradient fill. The modifiers reflect, duplicate, or fit the object precisely. The gradient is editable directly within the document with a new set of control handles. Rounded corners are definitely easier to create with the tricks you can perform on rectangles using the Subselect tool, and ellipses can have precise sections of their arcs removed. Polygons are now extremely editable. You can make changes in stars or straight-sided polygons live on the object, or through options in the Object panel.

You can import a SWF (Flash) 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.



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Macromedia Studio MX Bible
Macromedia Studio MX Bible
ISBN: 0764525239
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 491

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