Integrating FreeHand Files with Fireworks MX

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 Fireworks MX   What FreeHand lacks in the graphic bells and whistles you see on the Web today, Fireworks makes up in a big way. FreeHand doesn't have much in the way of textures and other soft-edge features that make a Web page look alive. That's the job of Fireworks, and it's quite adept at it. Each of the programs in the Studio MX is suited to a particular job and works hand-in-glove with the other four programs.

Any graphics that you develop in FreeHand can be dragged and dropped, copied and pasted, exported and imported, or even opened directly in Fireworks, because FreeHand vector drawing tools are more powerful and numerous than those in Fireworks. If you want to have airbrushed strokes, soft drop shadows, and colorful textures, you can't get them from FreeHand, but you can do the heavy lifting there, and apply the fun stuff in Fireworks. The application of various stroke styles can be seen in Figure 10-4, and the result of a path with those stroke attributes is shown in Figure 10-5. FreeHand has a larger vector-based drawing toolset that is specifically designed for illustration. I think of it as using the right tool for the job. When my illustration or layout is complete, I move it into Fireworks to make my textured panels, 3-D buttons, and rollovers with ease.

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Figure 10-4: The Stroke Styles dialog box provides many variations of line treatments.


Figure 10-5: The bird has been turned into a fuzzy chick with a Hatched stroke style.

Fireworks can import native FreeHand files, EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, and BMP file types, but vector art should be copied/pasted from FreeHand for the best results. If your FreeHand file contains 0.5-point (hairline) strokes, they are imported into Fireworks as a 1-point line. Although this may seem like a bug, the thinnest line a monitor can reproduce is 1-pixel, or 1-point. Anything smaller either appears at 1-point, or disappears completely. Another caveat with the direct import of FreeHand files is that strokes automatically take on a round cap. The only way to maintain sharp corners on strokes is to export the files as GIF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, or BMP. Those formats provide sharp corners, but you lose the live vector editing capability available in a FreeHand copy/paste, drag and drop, or file import.

Because Fireworks is a Web-based program, it projects color in RGB. Therefore any graphics you make in FreeHand in CMYK or grayscale are converted to RGB. Oddly enough, if you choose black from the CMYK library for an object, and drop it into Flash, it retains a black appearance — 0r, 0g, 0b. However in Fireworks, that same operation results in a 90 percent gray made up of 24r, 21g, 18b.

You can take a multipage document in FreeHand and import it in Fireworks as layers or as single pages. The layers you set up in FreeHand can be imported as one flattened layer if you prefer. Conversely, you can convert the layers into separate frames to make an animation. Finally, you can maintain the layer stacking order as Fireworks layers.

Other options for importing FreeHand files are the inclusion of invisible layers (layers you've turned off), and importing the background layer with the page. If you don't choose either of these options (the default), invisible and background layers are ignored in the Fireworks import.

Another option is Render As Images. This has the benefit (or hazard) of turning everything into a single bitmap. All groups, blends, or tiled fills are reduced to a bitmap object. There's a text input field where you can enter the number of objects that must be in a group, blend, or tiled fill before Fireworks rasterizes the file. If the vector you are importing has the specified number of objects or steps it will be rasterized as a bitmap image instead of as a vector. If you don't want this to happen, remove the number from the field.

Simple button shapes are a snap in Fireworks. If you want something more complicated, it may be advantageous to set up the basics in FreeHand first; then add the bevels, highlights, shadows, and so on in Fireworks.

Another time-saver is the creation of a symbol in FreeHand that you can export into Fireworks, where you can modify it — as a symbol. All instances reflect your modifications.



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

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