One thing i never understand was why a lot of people prefer Photoshop instead of Fireworks for prototyping and building up a layout for a webapp or site.
For me it was always clear, that the basic vector tools, some bitmap effects(live-effect) and the ability to handle the file-export easily are enough to setup a layout. At least the pixel-perfect positioning threw input fields of vector-forms is a main, maybe the biggest reason for me to use Fireworks.
I met some designers that prefer using Illustrator/Photoshop to get their results, but i always discovered that this combination has a major drawback, two different tools for one thing.
But in the last month i am getting very annoyed about Fireworks because of its bad font-rendering behavior. One major reason is the Anti-Aliasing of Fonts. The basic settings (Crisp, Strong, Smooth) are crap. Font-sizes up to 15px are looking like the same that my neighboures dog lost in front of my door this morning. Event for the basic fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma it is heavy to find a good anti-aliasing setting.
About font-sizes around 10px, 11px, 12px (this is usually my choise for floating text or text that is not so important) the things get really worse.
Next big problem with Fireworks is rendering text. Even the Flash-Player has better capabilities of how to render text, especiall block-text (and for sure, Flash-Player has the better Anti-Aliasing).
In version 10 of a product that has its focus on prototyping web-applications i expect a bit more than block-left aligned, block-right aligned and an unusable block-centric. At least it should be possible to have a multi-line paragraph that is block-text and the lines do not have this crazy kerning.
Multi-column text would also be a nice feature. Maybe it is possible to get the new Flash-Player text-rendering with the new text-layout framework to work with Fireworks. Would be an advancement to the current status. But i would prefer to have the same text-anti-aliasing like Photoshop had it.
I also discovered a bug. First i thought is has nothing to do with Fireworks and it depends on the used font, but later i see that it also happens with system fonts.
The text should be in the blue area.
I am currently thinking about how to improve this without changing the tools. But i think its Adobe’s turn now.
h.
Btw. if you have similar problems or even better a solution for this, just drop me a few lines here.
Hmm, very cognitive post.
Is this theme good unough for the Digg?
Link | February 24th, 2009 at 03:51
I agree. I’ve had lots of problems with text in Fireworks too – for years. If you change the size of the document (during import of an Illustrator document, or via the “document size” menu item), the kerning of the text gets all messed up – the result is barely useable (I don’t think that has to do with the anti-aliasing!). If you scale a document 200%, the text is scaled too – but not the point value (a 6 pt font remains 6 pt, although it is twice the size). Imported Illustrator documents loose font information – all text becomes Monaco, Bold italic. In theory, Fireworks is great – but these bugs make it difficult and time-consuming to use. Are the people at Adobe (and formerly Macromedia) blind?
Link | March 6th, 2009 at 04:12
@Angellaa quite not sure about it
Link | March 6th, 2009 at 21:21
I share your point about Fireworks vs. PS. I have been using Fireworks for years now and never looked back. The simplicity of the tool and how well it is suited for comps and layouts just can’t be beat by Photoshop. I know those die-hards out there who swear by PS but do you really need the 800 pound photo editing tool to work on web layouts?
Text IS crap however. FW CS4 has TONS of bugs in it too that make the app crash all the time. Hopefully there will be updates soon.
Link | March 30th, 2009 at 17:29
As a big fan of Fireworks, I humbly have to agree. I get so mad when I spend a lot of time rendering a sweet web template only to have the text look second rate. Please Adobe, do something about this. You have the best possible program in the world for what it does, but I am actually considering using Photoshop just for the reason of text output. I would be very sad if I had to do this. It would be like a large step backwards.
Link | August 1st, 2009 at 20:26