Update: Solutions to My Illustrator Problems

It occurred to me after writing the previous post that perhaps there was some way to fix Illustrator and get rid of those pesky issues with the pen and brush tools. After all, plenty of other people use Illustrator to draw, so it must be possible.

Lo and behold, the solutions are out there:

• Keep pencil from erasing previous line when you start a new one.
  The answer is buried pretty deep into this thread, so I'll reveal it here: Double-click on the pencil tool. Uncheck "Keep selected." Do the same for the brush tool.
• Make a brush that responds to tablet pressure.

After making these adjustments, I was able to create the following doodle:

This was all done with one brush. See how close the circles making up the necklace are? No way I could have done that before! But now I can draw a row of tiny circles, one right after the other, without hitting Cmd + D after each one.

I Miss FreeHand

I miss Macromedia FreeHand's freehand tool. When Adobe bought Macromedia, I wish they'd incorporated it into Illustrator. Instead, all I've got is Illustrator's lousy pencil and its dumb brushes.

You see, if you're drawing in Illustrator and you start drawing a new line too close to where you stopped the previous one, the software deletes the old line and replaces it with the new one. I don't know why somebody thought this was a useful feature. Perhaps Adobe's programmers thought that everyone likes to draw in one, long, unbroken stroke?

The only way to stop Illustrator from deleting the line you just drew is to deselect it. In older versions of Illustrator, this was Cmd + D. Annoying, but not too much trouble. However, in CS3, they've changed the keyboard shortcut for deselect to Shift + Cmd + A, a whole new "three-finger salute." At least I can change it back in the preferences, but it's still annoying.

In FreeHand, I could just draw, with a tool that responded to the pressure of my pen. Look at the difference. Here's some doodles I drew in FreeHand:

And here's one I drew in Illustrator, with a pencil and a brush line:

See how one-dimensional the brush looks? I miss FreeHand.