Features

Add more visual punch to your designs and illustrations—apply unlimited stroke, fill, and effect attributes to a single vector or text object while maintaining editability of the base object. Multiple attributes eliminate the need to stack duplicates of an object to create a particular appearance, making updates easier, faster, and with fewer objects to manage.

You can even build attributes on top of groups and symbols, making it fast and easy to apply such visual effects as blurs and drop shadows to entire sections of a design at once.

Maximize creative expression with live effects, which apply complex distortions and effects without altering the original object. FreeHand MX includes such vector effects as bend, sketch, and transform—as well as bevel, drop shadow, and gradient transparency raster effects. The Object panel allows you complete control over effects, as well as to all or selected object attributes.

Quickly and easily reshape rectangles, ellipses, and polygons while maintaining the control and editability of FreeHand MX graphic primitives. You can easily round rectangle corners or mix them concave or convex, convert ellipses to arcs, and change polygons to stars with an editable numbers of points.

Support for alpha channels allows you to seamlessly integrate images containing transparency into your designs. FreeHand MX provides full import and display support of 32-bit image formats.

FreeHand MX was the first high-end, PostScript-based drawing program to offer true, dynamic transparency capabilities while preserving documents in an editable vector format. Transparent lenses are one of the standard fill types available in FreeHand MX.

You can set transparency attributes, such as shape, location, opacity, and color. Dynamically change the opacity and color fill of an object to reveal objects behind the lens-filled object. Or show transparency effects only in the overlapping object areas.

FreeHand MX offers the best way to represent 3D media in a 2D drawing environment. The perspective grid puts your artwork into perspective in seconds: just set up background-perspective grid-guides with infinitely adjustable vanishing points and horizon lines, allowing for 3D effects in a familiar illustration environment.

Snap any vector object to the grid, creating accurate perspective views. Objects automatically scale as they are moved toward the vanishing points, and change perspective as you move them up and down the grid. Once objects are attached to the grid, you can change the grid layout and perspective, automatically updating objects on the grid to match the new perspective.

With FreeHand MX, you can use object-based handles to rotate, scale, skew, or move graphics directly, without having to select different tools for each transform. To bring up interactive transform handles, simply double-click any object or selection of multiple objects with the Pointer tool. When you’ve finished your move, double-click again to turn the transform handles off.