LONG TIME FREEHAND USER, I HAVE A QUESTION

Question

Hey gang, Like the post says I'm a loooong time FreeHand user and I love it and I'm finally starting to realize that it may be gone for good (wipes tear away) Recently I've been trying to learn Illustrator and there are certainly things I like (transparancies, LivePaint, Shape Builder tool, Variable Width tool) There are things I like way better in FreeHand (live manipulation of stars and polygons, simpler tools for beizer curves, 3D effects are live and don't require a secondary window, type on a path is much easier) But I'm not trying to start a "which is better" fight. I do have a question about pdf export from Illustrator though:
Recently I had to send a client a pdf for review. It had 2 placed high rez jpegs in it. I exported it from Illustrator and it ended up being 25MB. Way too large for me to email. So I opened the same file in FreeHand and exported to pdf and it was under 3MB. My FreeHand files have always been much smaller than my Illustrator files, but this big of a difference almost makes me thing I'm doing something wrong. How can I get my pdf's exported from Illustrator to be a smaller file size comparable to my FreeHand pdf's?
Thanks again!

Answer 1

There are things I like way better in FreeHand...
live manipulation of stars and polygons
Geometric primitives, otherwise known in the old days as LBOs (Lines, Boxes, Ovals, but includes arcs, stars, polygons, etc.) in Illustrator have never been created as special objects with live geometric parameters (corner radius, number of points/sides, angular sweep, etc.) as they are in just about every other program on the planet. In Illustrator, they are just created as lame ordinary paths. One of many very very basic standard functions taken for granted everywhere except in Illustrator.
...simpler tools for beizer curves...
More precisely, the archaic and cumbersome interface Illustrator applies to selection (in general, not just paths) in combination with its unnecessarily tedious multi-tool routines for manipulating Bezier paths, in combination with its inconsistent interface display logic. FreeHand's interface for this remains best-of-class. Illustrator's remains worst-of-class. Everything else is somewhere in between.
…3D effects are live and don't require a secondary window…
Illustrator's 3D Effect is an entirely different featue from FreeHand's 3D Extrude. Illustrator's 3D Effect actually calculates 3D geometry; it builds an actual 3D model. FreeHand's 3D Extrude is an arguably clever, but strictly 2D "perspective" kind of construction. There is no actual 3D involved in FreeHand's 3D Extrude feature.
As for the modal dialog: Illustrator is chock full of them. One of the dead giveaways of an archaic, outdated program. So 1980s.  But the one in 3D Effect arguably makes sense, because 3D Effect is a plug-in which actually is a subset of the functionality of an entirely separate and discontinued program (Adobe Dimensions).
…type on a path is much easier…
Just wait. That's just the tip of the Illustrator text-handling iceberg.
…a pdf…ended up being 25MB.
This is all part of a mostly smoke-and-mirrors marketing ploy that Adobe (owner of Illustrator, PostScript, and creator of PDF) perpetrated upon the industry a decade or so ago in which it proudly proclaimed "PDF is now Illustrator's native format!"
It's a semantics game in which Adobe basically tries to redefine commonly-understood terms like "native" and "file format." In fact, only the basic constructs of Illustrator objects are understood by PDF. For practical purposes, all the former ballyhoo about 'Illustrator and PDF being the same thing' boils down to this:
By default, when you save an Illustrator file, Illustrator writes an entirely separate version of the content as PDF and "tucks it away" inside the resulting file. That's one large chunk of what makes Illustrator's files look so inappropriately large. Other Adobe programs read the PDF content and ignore the actual AI-native content. So, for example, InDesign's interface scheme pretends that it can place an Illustrator file. It's really just placing the PDF content that is tucked away inside an Illustrator file. Save that "very same AI file" with the PDF Compatibility option turned off, though, and InDesign will not be able to place it.
Inversely, Illustrators interface scheme now pretends that it can Save a PDF as opposed to the normally-understood meaning of exporting a PDF. All this means is that by default, Illustrator writes into the resulting PDF an entirely separate version of the content as Illustrator native objects and "tucks it away" inside the resulting file. So again, you end up with an absurdly bloated PDF. Programs other than Illustrator read the PDF content and ignore the actual AI-native content. Save that "very same PDF file" with the Maintain Illustrator Editability option turned off, though, and when you open it again later with Illustrator, you'll find that everything has been dumbed-down to the simpler and more basic constructs that PDF actually handles, contained in a bunch of (often nested) clipping paths. In commonly-understood language, you have not "opened" that PDF; you've imported it.
It's similar to what Macromedia did with PNG and Fireworks. Fireworks doesn't even give its native files a unique file extension. It's "just" PNG. But in commonly-undertood terms, it's not just PNG. The PNG format was written to accommodate a mechanism by which a program that writes the PNG can "tuck away" or "comment out" or "embed" anything its own content. So when Macromedia built Fireworks it just built it to write all its own native stuff (for example, its vector paths) in that "embedded" region of the file, and still save the file as a PNG. So—PNG being the raster image format that it really is—someone uses a raster program (Photoshop, etc.) to open a PNG that some unsuspecting Fireworks user created thinking it's a vector/raster metaformat (after all, PNG is Fireworks's "native" format, right?). The Photoshop user makes some minor edit and saves the PNG. The Fireworks user opens the file and wonders where all his Fireworks-native vector objects went.
Adobe, of course, acquired Macromedia, discontinued the vector program with which it could never functionally compete, and kept the web-centric drawing/painting program Fireworks. But of course Fireworks didn't handle the smoke-and-mirrors the way Adobe did with Illustrator. So now, in the most recent versions of Photoshop, you receive an alert when you open a PNG that says something like "Contains Fireworks content that will be lost when you Save this file." Real elegant, huh?
Such nonsense and confusion is what results when programmers are pushed by marketing to over-insulate the click-and-drag users from what is really going on.
JET