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 March
18, 2001
Recovering Art from Lens
Fills
Lens filled shapes are a great way to
add highlights to your art or to mimic repetitive layouts for other
production needs. There are several tips in the Tips Archive that detail
these methods.
One thing that may happen however, is
if you or someone else, has used the Snapshot option on a Lens
fill. This will make a copy of the underlying object inside the Lens
shape so you can remove the original drawing to keep clutter down. The
problem is, if you've accidentally removed the original shapes, you
can't get them back to edit them... or can you?
If you get a lens filled shape with the
Snapshot option turned on, there is hope of completely recovering that
lost art embedded inside the lens. Here's how.
Version: 8-9
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Above is a document given to me
that contains a couple of Lens fills. The detail enlargement that
you see is actually a Magnification Lens fill. There will
be changes that need to be made to this mini-map but the original
art was no where to be found except inside this Lens fill.
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Upon further inspection of the fill,
we can see that it is a Magnify Lens fill and that it has the
Snapshot option turned on. This is good news.
When you have this option turned
on, it keeps the contents of the Lens intact wherever you move
it. This means we can completely recover the art contained in
this fill.
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WARNING
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Be extremely careful with these
"unattached" Lens fills. If you change the type
of fill, the contents will be removed. Also if you
turn off the Snapshot option you'll lose the contents as
well. Just leave everything as it is for now.
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To begin the recovery process, Copy
that Lens fill and Paste it into a new document.
In the Fill Inspector palette, turn
down any options of the Lens fill to their lowest setting.
In this case, I brought down the Magnification level to it's lowest
setting of 1.
For Transparency, Lighten and Darken
Lens fills, set the lowest setting to 0%.
Unfortunately, there isn't really
anything you can do about Invert and Monochrome
Lens fills. If you end with either of these, you can continue
the process below, but you'll end up with art that is either colored
very oddly, or in monochrome so you'll have to re-color the art
in the end.
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Next Export this new document
with the Lens fill. Select FreeHand 7 document as the format.
Name it and Export.
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Now import the file you just
exported. When you place the file, you'll notice that the Lens
fill has been converted into a clipping path with a Paste inside.
Notice the telltale clover bullet
that shows it's a Paste Inside.
When you export a Lens fill to v7
format, the fill is converted to a Paste Inside since FreeHand
7 doesn't know what a native Lens fill is.
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Once I Cut Contents, I now
have all the original objects that were embedded in that Lens
fill, ready to be edited.
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Wasn't that a handy little tip? This one
was brought about in response to a problem posted on the FreeHand
Newsgroup. It's a great place to visit to find friendly people who
want to chat about FreeHand or have a tough question that needs to be
answered. You should check it out if you haven't already. The link to
it can be found from the Links & Resources page here at this
site.
If you have any other great ways of using
Lens fills, please send them in. 
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