Expert: Alyn - 7/19/2000

Question
I use Freehand for making black & white maps for guidebooks and would like to create custom lines to better symbolize rivers and streams. Presently I use a 30% screen tint for streams but the fine dots output by the printer`s imagesetter do not stand out well. In the old days when I made these maps manually, I used Ziptone, which had a coarser dot pattern. This actually stood out very well, in contrast to the roads on the maps, which are solid black. Do you know any way to get Freehand to print lines with a coarser dot screen, similar to the old Ziptone? I`ve heard that it`s possible to program customized lines but I don`t know how. Do you know anyone who can do this?

Answer
dwight,
if you go under the topic "widow" at the top of you screen and select inspector stroke, the inspector box will come up, at the bottom of that box is a box that says "no dash"..it has a wide range of dash options for a stroke or outline.....the other option you may consider  (which is more time consuming, but offer better control) is that after you create your line create a shape you want to be repeated as a line marker.....then cut that shape........then click on you text tool.....instead of typeing text either go under you edit window and select paste, or hit command v.......this will place that shape in the text box.....repeat to get a series of the shape.......then while text box is select select the line you have created, go to your text window along the top and attach text to path...then you can repeat the pasting within the text unitl it reaches the desired length...you can adjust kerning and baseline in the text inspector as if it were actual text.....i hope this helps

alyn dunn