The basics

June 15th, 2006 by Posted in Macromedia FreeHand, Macromedia Products

There’s a fairly broad range of FreeHand versions that you can import into Macromedia Flash MX. You can directly import FreeHand versions 7, 8, 9 and 10. So if you own any version of FreeHand made in the last five years or so, you’ll have what you need.

You can import all kinds of great stuff, some of which you had no way to get into Macromedia Flash before:


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Symbols
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FreeHand layers
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FreeHand Lens fills, with some exceptions (see the list below)
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Gradient fills
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Imported TIFF, GIF, JPG, and PNG bitmaps
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Blended and composite paths
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FreeHand clipping paths
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Text blocks as editable Flash text
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Arrowheads
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Dashed lines (using a little trick)

It’s great that you can import all kinds of things into Macromedia Flash from a FreeHand 10 file. But sometimes it’s more important to know what you cannot import:



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Tiled fills, Custom fills, PostScript fills, Pattern fills, Textured fills, and Lens fills (other than a simple transparency) don’t import into Macromedia Flash. Many FreeHand fills are designed for PostScript printing and built on top of the PostScript drawing engine. These fills require a PostScript interpreter to appear correctly, and Macromedia Flash just doesn’t have one of these.
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Dashed strokes, Pattern strokes and PostScript strokes won’t import.
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Certain types of fonts don’t work either, such as bitmapped fonts and locked outline fonts.
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Text effects don’t preview or export as SWF.
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EPS files don’t preview or export as SWF.
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Objects with Lens fills affect only objects underneath them that are on the same layer.


Proper FreeHand page size

Simplify your life by setting up your FreeHand page to match the size of your Macromedia Flash movie. This makes it significantly easier to position elements when they’re imported into Flash. The easiest way to do this is to set the ruler measurement in FreeHand to either points or pixels (which are basically the same) and then choosing a custom page size that matches your Flash movie. It’s usually helpful to set the page’s orientation to landscape as well, because most Macromedia Flash movies are wider than they are tall.

If you choose not to resize the FreeHand page, then draw only in the very upper-left corner of the pasteboard, or else resize the FreeHand page to match the size of the object after drawing it. It’s probably best to draw in the upper-left, because Macromedia Flash imports the entire FreeHand page, and if your object is way down in the lower-right corner, it’ll have that corresponding position when imported into Macromedia Flash (and may actually be outside the movie’s stage, which can be confusing).

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