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First Steps: Learning the User InterfaceYou've just arrived, switched off the ignition, grabbed the suitcase, walked up the porch steps, and swung open the door. Already you can see that the floor plan and decor is rather different than the place from which you came. Go ahead, step inside and flip on the switch. Multiple Pages, Where Art Thou?The basic document environments for FreeHand and Illustrator are so similar it hurts. Why this pain? Because the environment in Illustrator is almost identical to FreeHand 3, before the multiple page capability was added. In those days, both programs framed a single page within a very similarly sized (within inches) Pasteboard workspace. FreeHand's page was placed at the lower left and when resized, it grew toward the upper/right (Figure B.4 ). The page in Illustrator was (and still is) placed in the middle of the Pasteboard and when resized, it grew (grows) from the center out (Figure B.5 ). Figure B.4. FreeHand's Pasteboard is a little over 224 inches square. The default first page is near the lower left corner. Pages grow upward and toward the right.[View full size image]  Figure B.5. The Pasteboard in Illustrator is a little over 227 inches square. The single artboard is in the center and grows from the center outward.Chapter 12, Saving and Exporting Files ). Working With Rulers, Grids, and GuidesWith Illustrator, you can choose between points, picas, inches, millimeters, centimeters, and pixels, and value read-outs in palettes will change accordingly the next time a selection causes them to update. But other scales in FreeHand, such as decimal inches, are not offered, and you cannot create custom scales such as 1"=10' and have value fields reflect the scale accordingly.Chapter 7, 3D and Other Live Effects ) goes a long way toward overcoming this problem by providing object snapping behaviors similar to FreeHand's Snap To Object, and also interactive remote object and point alignment while drawing, which Free-Hand lacks. |
Where's the Inspector?
FreeHand's Object palette (which many FreeHand users still refer to as the Object Inspector) is like a one-stop shop for info on and settings for the current selection. The closest counterpart to this in Illustrator is the Appearance palette, and it is also probably the most important palette to have always handy.The Appearance palette, like FreeHand's Object palette, is where you find the stack of strokes, fills, and effects that are applied to the current selection. The Appearance palette also displays some of the specific information about the items in that stack; for example, the weight of a stroke appears within its listing.Beyond that, however, the similarity begins to break down because of this important difference: Although the Appearance palette in Illustrator is where you can view the stack of strokes, fills, and effects, it is not where you edit them, and in the case of effects, not where you apply them. You can add strokes and fills using the Appearance palette menu, but to adjust their parameters, you still must go to various other palettes. As in FreeHand, you can apply effects to individual strokes or fills, but you select them from the Effects menu, not from the Appearance palette.For example, consider a simple path with a basic appearance (one stroke, one fill). If this object is selected in FreeHand, the item stack lists the stroke and its weight. Likewise, if an identical object is selected in Illustrator, the stroke and its weight is one of the items listed.However, in FreeHand, if you then select the stroke listing itself, all of its particular settings and options appear at the bottom of the Object palette. For example, the stroke's type, weight, cap, join, dash, arrowhead, and overprint settings appear, and they are editable right there in the Object palette (Figure B.6 ).
Figure B.6. In FreeHand, the settings for the selected object's attributes are presented in the bottom of the Object Properties palette as contextual screens that display according to which item in the attributes stack is selected. All four of these screens are displayed at the bottom of the single Object palette.
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Figure B.7. Although the Appearance palette in Illustrator is similar to the Object palette in that it provides a stack of strokes, fills, and effects and displays some of their settings, and although the detail settings are sensitive to which item is selected in the stack, the actual settings reside in individual separate palettes. Ready access to all of these palettes is necessary in order to make all the settings represented in the previous view of FreeHand's Object palette.
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By the NumbersValue fields in FreeHand palettes and dialogs accept and retain numerical values to six decimal places, whereas Illustrator displays four. Under the hood, every measure in Illustrator is converted from its underlying native measure of 72 points per inch. This, combined with the four-decimal display, often leads to what the FreeHand user sees as disconcerting numerical inaccuracies in value fields. For example, if like many users, you've memorized the decimal equivalent of 1/16th as .0625, and then you enter ".0625/2" in a value field, the displayed result will be .0313, not .03125. This does not mean that Illustrator did not make your object .03125 in width. It only rounded the value for the sake of the display in the palette. However (and unfortunately), if you then enter "*2" after the displayed value to double the object's measure, Illustrator recalculates the entire expression, which is now keyed into the field, with a result of .0626 instead of restoring the previous .0625. Does a thousandths of an inch inaccuracy matter? You decide. |
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