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 April
28, 2001
Adding Colors to the
Color Wells
FreeHand 10's new Color Wells in
the Tools palette are a great addition, but what if you want to use
other color libraries in there? Well it's very easy to accomplish, as
you will see below.
Version: 10
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Above are the FreeHand color wells.
When you click on them, they expand to show you the default colors
FreeHand uses. If you click on the pullout menu on the right of
the palette, you will see two choices.
The Swatches choice gives you the
current colors defined in your document. Color Cubes are the default
Web Safe colors.
But what about the Pantone colors
or other custom libraries you may have?
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First, all the color libraries FreeHand
uses are located in the English -> Color directory
as shown above. This is not the directory FreeHand uses to find
the color swatches for the Color Wells.
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FreeHand uses a different directory
for the Color Wells colors. It's found in the English ->
Settings -> Color Swatches directory shown above.
To add colors to the Wells, just
drag copies of the color libraries from the Color
directory to this Color Swatches directory.
As you can see above, I copied over
the Crayon, Greys and Pantone libraries. The one labeled Color
Cubes is the default library.
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If you have FreeHand running, you'll
have to Quit it and relaunch for any changes to take effect.
Now when you click in the Color
Well settings, you'll have these libraries ready to use in your
documents.
How handy is that?
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WARNING
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There have been reports that if
you move ALL of the color libraries to the Color Swatches directory,
that you may experience performance slow downs when using
the Gradient Fills.
The problem seems to mostly show
up if you use a lot of the libraries that end with the .BCF
extension. Just to be safe, only copy a few of the libraries
that you think you'll use the most.
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Pretty neat trick eh? Don't forget that
if you use colors from the Color Wells, you'll have to make sure that
they show up in your Color Swatches list so you can see what colors
you are using. To easily do this, go under the Xtras menu ->
Colors -> Name all colors. 
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