I’ve been messing around with the freehand command in beta and figured I’d give some feedback in case there’s going to be anymore development on this command.
1. Clicking to add a new point to a curve does not default to extending from the endpoint of the curve, but seems to prefer to connect the new point to the nearest existing point. This can result in a new point being added to somewhere in the middle of the curve.
2. It’s unclear how DG decides to bend new segments as points are added to a freehand curve. This is quite a bit more intuitive when using the pen tool in Illustrator…new points are added where you click, and then you drag to move the tangent controls. In DG, when you drag, you move the point and the tangent controls simultaneously.
3. It’s easy to locate a freehand shape where I want it when both x and y axes are linear, but log axes are a problem. If one or both of the axes are log-scaled, drawing the shape in the correct location on the viewer within the command results in the shape being located in the wrong place on the graph. Switching axes to linear before making the shape, then switching back to log, automatically moves and rescales the shape so it remains in the right place.
My overall opinion: I make a lot of scatter plots that superimpose numerous datasets for easy comparison, and representing these different datasets as colored regions rather than points/markers really cleans up my graphs. So it’s great to have this freehand command in DG because it means I don’t have to export all my figures to another program to draw these regions. But the way it works feels a little awkward and non-intuitive. I can get good results but it requires some workarounds.
scgc.
scgc
dgteam