Macromedia Freehand 9 can be purchased by itself or as a part of the Freehand 9/ Flash 5 Studio. As with the other three products, Freehand 9 shares an integrated interface. It contains a good manual with a guided tour and lessons available from the Help Menu.

Freehand 9 is an excellent vector editing program with capabilities to handle rasterized images. Its interface is very intuitive and its panels are self descriptive. It is very easy to use to create, modify, or export vector images. The example on the right shows how vector images are manipulated through the use of handles. For this image to be used in my art work, I transformed it into a symbol. See the illustration on the left. Symbols (the representation of a Freehand object) and instances (the symbol placed on the page) reduce the size of a file because the file does not grow in size when they are used more than once. Files can be exported as flash SWF files. Also Flash 5 can import from Freehand.

Precision illustrating is easier in Freehand 9 with the New Selection Commands allowing selections to be inverted or allowing the user to utilize the Subselect Command. A Subselection is an object that makes up a group of objects that are grouped to be considered a complete unit or group.

Of course all the standard vector based tools are present along with menus to work with raster or bitmapped images. Freehand 9 can import files from Ilustrator 7 with linked images in formats such as GIF, JPEG, PSD, or Targa.

In addition, Freehand 9 integrates with many bitmap or raster based programs. Freehand files exported to Photoshop 5 retain their layers. TIFFs can be imported with clipping paths, documents containing URLs with links to the web can be imported and exported, and exported files can be automatically opened into the desired application.

RGB or CMYK bitmaps can be traced as can Tiffs. However, it should be noted that if the paths appear complex, the resultant image can be larger than the original non-vector image is when exported.

A Freehand document can be published as a web page using the HTLM wizard. Other wizards are also available to instruct and simplify other tasks.

Working on a web page is made easier by the page layout menu that offers the choice of page size in pixels as well as a grid and rulers using pixels. This allows for an immediate idea of how images will relate to the page size. For example, a page can be set up to be 600 x 800 pixels.

Movies can be created in Freehand and exported as Flash movies in the SWF format. Exporting to Flash initializes options. They are pictured to the right. The next to last choice, on the Flash Export Panel, allows for the Flash movie to be protected so that it cannot be downloaded and placed in someone else's movie.

Freehand 9 has made the commitment to integrate with the web. Shortly after this review will appear, Freehand 10 will be available. For more information on both products, go the Macromedia web site. The Freehand 9/Flash 5 Studio retails for about $ 575.00, and the upgrade for about $240. Freehand alone sells for about $380. The competitive upgrade is $160 and the version upgrade is $140.

As stated in the beginning of this review, I found Freehand to be a powerful program and easy to use.