> I have some questions about creating and editing digital 'pen & ink' line
> drawings?

Launi,

I only do "pen & ink" and now I pretty much only do it on my Mac.
I'm a pretty low-budget, lower-tier illustrator and I don't have
much call to do very fancy stuff. Freehand cures more of my ills than any
other product I've tried. I do not have a tablet and I've never tried
Painter so I can't give you an educated opinion about those tools. Maybe
because I have been forced all these years to work with a mouse (once I
moved from my board to the computer) that I feel that I've become quite
proficient at drawing with it. There are some tricks in Freehand that make
this less of a chore than one may think. For instance, if you use the
Bezigon tool to draw by placing points, you get curve points (and
therefore lines) if you hold down the option key as you place the points.
This can be a pretty quick process once you are used to coordinating
one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse.

Right now I'm working on an encyclopedia project that involves a lot of
scanning and redrawing. It's going beautifully scanning images into
Photoshop and making various adjustments there, then exporting as TIFFs
and importing into Freehand. Illustrator users would probably say the same
thing about Illustrator, but Freehand gives me more control over my
projects than anything else. I even use it as a page layout program much
of the time because I know I can get exactly what I want on a page from
Freehand.

-Catherine

 =======================================================================
Catherine Sexton
Multimedia Services Coordinator

Academic Technologies, Facilities & Multimedia Services
Academic Computing Services, The University of Chicago
email: [log in to unmask]; Multimedia Services (773)834-4499
C.Sexton (773)834-0028; fax:(773)702-3219
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