Re: FLASH: FH9 vs AI9 (was: Curved text)

[John Dowdell]

Forgive me for not going quote/reply here... on some of these I'd have to

get into the various apps to check their options, and I'm 'way behind due

to those Flash 5 threads, so I can't put the time where I'd prefer to put

it.


Yes, the "Release to Layers" in FreeHand, that has now been adopted by

Illustrator, lets you put blends onto separate layers, so that you can then

do a layers-to-frames SWF export to make an animation.


The pages-to-frames animation option in FreeHand's SWF export lets you make

an animation as separate pages in FreeHand. (Illustrator doesn't do this,

because it doesn't have multiple pages.) It can often be useful to see an

animation as a storyboard.


Gradient-recognition is tricky... if you've ever imported a

PostScript-style gradient as an .AI file you've seen how it's actually a

type of blend. When exporting to SWF, some tools will replace a

PostScript-style blend with an actual SWF-style blend... it's a difference

between storing tiny mathematical instructions, and larger descriptions of

each step in the gradient.


FreeHand 9 has a symbol library, and it will export to SWF. I remember that

names transfer, but I don't remember whether you can store an animation

here (I think not, because animations exist only on export in FH), and I'm

not sure about folders... there's a trial version on the website if this is

important.


Graphic search/replace and graphic styles complement symbol libraries

because you don't have to make a symbol *before* you want to update it.

    Suppose you drew a bunch of stars, then gave some different colors and

rotated others, and then copied it a bunch of times, and then decided they

should have slightly sharper angles... with symbols, you'd have to make it

a repeating element *before* you could mass-update it. With graphic

search/replace, you could find all objects of that shape whether or not you

planned and made them symbols. Graphic styles straddle this range of

options, by letting you affect only certain parameters of certain objects

which may have totally different other parameters... changing colors from

CMYK to RGB, or thickening particular strokes, etc.

   All three allow for quickly updating content, but each uses a different

mechanism: symbols predefine all attributes of an element, styles predefine

some attributes of various elements, search/replace does not predefine but

can capture any selected attribute of any element.



FreeHand's transparency is handled by a "lens": a type of fill which can be

partially transparent, or tinting, or magnification or more. For print it

does this by duplicating the shapes within a clipping path. The FreeHand

transparency is automatically exported as SWF transparency.

   (FreeHand does not have the per-object transparency that you see in

Fireworks... instead of an opacity slider, there's a transparency type of

fill that you can adjust.)



> someone mentioned offlist that FH exports text as text, not

> graphics -- is this true, and does it mean I end up with a

> smaller Flash file size by exporting text from FH than I

> would if I exported the same text from AI?


Sorry, I don't remember the text options in the FlashWriter Export Plugin

for Illustrator 8, and I don't have ILL9 to test its options myself. In

FreeHand's SWF export you can have text retained in an editable block, or

have it automatically converted to curves, or have text ignored

altogether... a few options.



jd








John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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