FreeHand has long been one of the most powerful draw programs on the Mac. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 offered more features than any draw programs in their time. But FreeHand 3.0’s emphasis on questionable interface enhancements allowed Adobe Illustrator 3.0 to surpass it in many respects — especially in the realm of text — and let Deneba’s Canvas 3.0 take the leading role in features.
But all misgivings I had with FreeHand 3.0 are forgotten with version 4.0, a program that is every bit as powerful as Illustrator 5.0. While FreeHand continues to serve up its share of bewildering interface peculiarities, its new page-design and text-editing functions make it more than worth the price of admission.
The New Desktop Publisher
When you first use FreeHand 4.0, you may wonder why its new page-layout features aren’t included in Aldus PageMaker. Here are two products from the same company, and yet the draw program does a better job of handling small-document design than the page-layout program. FreeHand lets you create as many pages as will fit on a 54-by-54-inch pasteboard (roughly 30 letter-size pages). You can move each page independently, make it a different size and orientation than its neighbors, duplicate whole page designs, view all pages at once, drag a page element directly from the first page in the document to the last, share guidelines between multiple pages, and create unusual page spreads consisting of 4 or even 6 pages abreast. Furthermore, you can link and relink text blocks between pages in any desired order, automatically copyfit by changing type size and leading, and divide text blocks into rows and columns. PageMaker doesn’t have any of these features, and only a couple are found in QuarkXPress. Granted, FreeHand lacks style sheets, it can’t check your spelling, it can only import text in RTF format, and you have to manually number pages. But for the consummate short-document designer, it can’t be beat. FreeHand 4.0 lets you experiment by providing you with immediate access to top-notch text and graphics tools; the only elements you ever have to import are the photos.
FreeHand’s text features have likewise been enhanced. The program can automatically hyphenate, a feature on a par with its counterpart in Illustrator. You can also adjust paragraph spacing, specify the lengths of the shortest lines in a block of non-justified text, and wrap text around graphics and define the amount of standoff between the two. None of these functions are implemented as fully in Illustrator. FreeHand also supports tabs and facilitates the creation of tables, just the thing for annotating a document with lists and data. (Ironically, FreeHand can’t translate your data into graphs, as Illustrator can, and Illustrator doesn’t handle tables. If either of the two did both, it might be onto something.)
There are a few minor problems, however. First, FreeHand’s text tool is frequently slow to react on 68030 and slower machines. On these machines, if you click wdth the text tool and immediately begin to type, FreeHand has a tendency to ignore the first two or three characters. Next, many of FreeHand’s operations apply only to text blocks drawn with the text tool. If you create text inside a standard rectangle — often an easier approach — these operations are unavailable. You can’t change text alignment or leading from the keyboard as you can in Illustrator. And FreeHand’s copyfitting functions only work inside single text blocks. For example, FreeHand can change the size and leading of text so it exactly fits in the confines of a text block — which may or may not include multiple columns — but it can’t fit the text in multiple linked blocks, a problem when working with the kinds of complex and irregular designs at which FreeHand otherwise excels.
Paths and Palettes
FreeHand supplies several new options for combining paths into new shapes, many of which function like Illustrator’s Pathfinder filters and the Combine functions in Canvas. You can unite two paths into a single shape, retain the intersecting portions only, subtract the rear path from the forward one, and remove intersecting segments in a single path. FreeHand provides less than half as many combination functions as Illustrator, but they don't depend on a math coprocessor as Illustrator’s filters do.
FreeHand 4.0’s interface relies heavily on palettes. On the plus side, you can now drag colors from palettes and drop them onto objects to change the colors of strokes and fills. You can even drag colors into gradations and copy colors between palettes.
On the minus side, FreeHand’s palettes are strangely organized and the options strangely apportioned. Altogether, there are nine palettes, eight of which tackle discrete operations. The ninth is the Inspector palette, a hodgepodge that pastes in roughly as many functions as the menu bar, including text formatting, fill and stroke attributes, object positioning, image correction, page setup, and miscellaneous preferences settings. As with Illustrator’s mixed-up Filters menu, it’ll probably take you a few days to find, let alone learn to use, the more than 100 options included in the Inspector palette.
My least favorite aspect of FreeHand 4.0 is its documentation. The manual itself is an example of style over substance, beautifully designed but lacking even basic explanations of many options. The Commercial Printing Guide is the only bright spot, accurately targeting what the reader needs to know.
Aside from the documentation, FreeHand 4.0 is an outstanding program. But is it better than Illustrator 5.0? In many ways, yes. FreeHand has better page-design functions, it supports tabs and tables, it offers multicolumn text blocks, it provides better copyfitting, and it imports and exports more graphics file formats. Illustrator, on the other hand, provides special-effects filters, significantly superior gradient fills, custom views and guidelines, and better display options. I have never seen a time when the two PostScript giants were more evenly matched. Suffice it to say that for now I’ll be using both programs, but I’d be happy with either.
McClelland, Deke. (March 1994). Aldus FreeHand 4.0. Macworld. (pg. 54).
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2021-12-03 / 
2023-04-02 / 
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Aldus-FreeHand-4.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
