FreeHand - upgrade to MX or stick with 10?

[bunner bob]

I'm currently using FreeHand 10 (Mac OS X) and while it's a bit buggy, I've mostly got it working. But there are a few nagging issues I'm getting tired of, and wondering whether MX fixes these, and/or makes other improvements that would make an upgrade worthwhile.

The specific issues I encounter in FH 10 are:

1. Lack of scroll wheel support. I've got a Kensington mouse with a scroll wheel, and 10 doesn't support it. Does MX support scroll wheels?

2. Transform palette fields vanishing. Frequently when I go to the transform palette, some of the fields and checkboxes are basically invisible. If I click around I can find them, but it's annoying. Same with the next/previous page arrows at the bottom of the document window.

3. Weird support for non-Roman fonts. I can enter text in TextEdit, save, import into Freehand, and it looks fine. But - I can't convert it to paths. The non-Roman (Kanji, Cyrillic, Greek) characters turn to gibberish.

I don't really need any new, flashy features, just these basic workability items.

But, I've also read a SLEW of negative reports on VersionTracker - about authorization, crashing, bugginess, etc. On the other hand, most of what you read on VT tends to run to the negative - people who aren't having problems don't report in. Can anyone fill me in on the general consensus about whether MX is buggier and less stable and more of a pain in the butt than 10, or more so, or about the same?

Thanks!
Bob

[perfessor101]

Originally Posted by bunner bob

1. Lack of scroll wheel support.

2. Transform palette fields vanishing.

3. Weird support for non-Roman fonts.

Can anyone fill me in on the general consensus about whether MX is buggier and less stable and more of a pain in the butt than 10, or more so, or about the same

1. On my Mac Freehand MX does support the scroll wheel. Whether that is a function of the Kensington Mouseworks I have installed or Freehand I don't know.
2. I have never encountered this problem with any version of Freehand.
3. I just ran a test with Freehand MX and attempted to insert characters from the character pallete into Freehand text. Boy was I surprised. With non-Roman character sets the characters displayed in the character pallete were not what got inserted. Even with Roman that was often the case and frequently I could not insert the character at all. Obviously Freehand MX does not play nice with OS X character sets outside of the normal character set. Bummer
4. Can't help you with the general concensus on Freehand MX but I can tell you that I personally have not had any significant problems with bugs or stability.

Just one subtle observation. I have used Freehand for several years and only recently have I found myself looking at other products as a possible replacement. Its is not as if I have made a conscious decision to change, I haven't.

[bunner bob]

Yeah, I've been giving some thought to Illustrator myself.

Pros: broader support, more 'respect' in the printing industry and among other design firms. Maybe fewer bugs, or different. Macromedia's lousy bug-fixing history. Undoubtedly better PDF creation.

Cons: slower, huge files, limited number of colors, lack of multi-page support. Its own set of bugs.

My wife/co-designer likes Freehand and so do I, so we'll probably stick with it. And probably upgrade to MX, if it isn't going to make anything worse than 10.

[JeffCGD]

Hi Bob. I have mixed news for you. While Freehand MX (11) is less buggy than FH10, even better with the hard to find update, It's still a buggy app. Absolutely riddled with problems (eg: selecting the layers palette tab causes a crash about once every 2 days, or post-scripting to file causing colour shifts in vector and placed EPS artwork - whereas exporting to EPS doesn't). Basically, if you can afford to switch to Illustrator, both in terms of cost, and legacy Freehand documents, I'd say go for it.
If you do choose to move to FHMX (which should be a FREE upgrade to people who paid good money for that garbage sold as FH10), I can 'help you find' the FHMX 11.01 updater, which at least PRETENDS to fix more bugs.

[bunner bob]

Have you tried 11.02? The (deeply buried) release notes say it fixes the layer palette click-n-crash

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/kn...fm?id=tn_19162

Seems to fix a lot of things, actually.