Freehand
Use the Freehand tool to draw an irregular line with the mouse just as you might with a pencil. In fact, the cursor changes to a pencil when you choose the Freehand tool. To draw a freehand shape, hold the mouse button down as you move the mouse. As with poly line and spline objects, you can add and delete handles, and split or join paths. You can also convert freehand objects into splines (see Poly Lines above). Hold down the Control or Command key to have more control.

The line is automatically smoothed when you release the mouse - to inhibit this smoothing, hold down the control-key when you release the mouse. This adds more handles to your object, and allows pencil precision.

As with splines and poly lines, you can create open or closed freehand objects. When the Outline inspector is activated (it is always activated when new objects are created), you can control whether the outlined freehand object is open or closed with the Open Path and Close Path buttons in the Attributes inspector. When the Outline inspector is not activated, the freehand object is closed and filled with the color that appears in the Plain Fill color well in the Attributes inspector (please refer to the descriptions of the Attributes and Outline inspectors in Chapter 4).

Lines or shapes created with the freehand tool may be edited. You will notice a number of object handles on the line or shape you have created. These handles are the points you can grab to edit the line or shape.

Hint: to get even smoother objects, try zooming to 200%, and then creating the object while holding down the Command key.

First Inspector: Attributes

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Created by Stone Design's Create on 4/26/2003