folta@tove.cs.umd.edu (Wayne Folta) (03/28/91)
If you ordered the upgrade to FreeHand 3.0, start checking your mailbox. I just got mine today, and it is awesome! Everything seems to work more smoothly, from the onscreen refreshing and dragging to the better auto-trace. As the reviews have said, the layer palette is very handy as is the conversion of Type 1 and Type 3 fonts to outlines. Several of my favorite features that I did not see in the previews that I read: * You can turn on curve point levers. At first glance, this simply connects the point's handles with a lever. But it is better: when you select a point, it turns on that point's levers and the levers on the adjacent points that point towards the selected point. This makes it very easy to manipulate an entire line segment at once. The fast, flicker-free redrawing also makes it very nice. (Only problem is that curve lines do not XOR with things below them, so you cannot see a line when you move it into a fill.) * You can nudge things around with the cursor keys. You select how much in the preferences. (Would be nice to be able to Option-nudge to get 1/10 of a nudge, ala QXP, but still very nice.) * You can use a dialog box to retract point handles. * You can select and manipulate elements of a group without ungrouping (ala QXP). Select with Option-click or Option-shift-click. You can also ungroup multiple selections at once! Boy, how I hated to ungroup groups of things before. * Supports OPI *and* DCS. * Context-sensitive help. CMD-Shift-? turns the cursor into a "?", which you then click on whatever puzzles you. * When you join path to a line, scale the whole thing, then ungroup it, the text no longer reverts back to the original scaling. The transformation follows the text. * When drawing, you can snap to points in already-existent figures. Oh, yes, they include a package of wildflower. The packet was designed in FreeHand 3.0, but the seeds are entirely natural. :-) -- Wayne Folta (folta@cs.umd.edu 128.8.128.8)