Bugs in Fireworks CS5?!
I have long been a huge fan of the graphics program Adobe Fireworks, despite the lack of support it gets from its owner, and the bugs which plagued the last version. The new version has just been announced, so I just downloaded the trial of Fireworks CS5. I am considering purchasing it, despite the slightly ridiculous increase in price.
There are none of the new features I hoped for: especially custom brushes, or the ability to make tables, rather than lining up hundreds of text boxes, have not arrived. We have recieved a few tweaks here and there, but mostly we have been promised 900 bug fixes, stability improvements and better speed.
I can cope with that. Fireworks CS4 without the terrible text bugs will be fine thanks.
So I just started playing around, and decided to resize some text. I. Can. Not. BELIEVE that I just got the exact same bug that plagued CS4 – Ctrl+T resize of text, causing crazy distortions. Picture on the right.
This is on a brand new file, not imported from anywhere else, just a blank file, with two text boxes and Ctrl+T. Absolute fail.
Adobe, what the hell is going on?
Update:
Just to clarify to any Adobe tech people, this is on Fireworks CS5 installed on Windows XP, with 2gig ram (its having no trouble running it). The error is reproducible simply by creating a new file, creating a text box, and then resizing it using Free Transform (Ctrl+T), and dragging the corner arrow, which should be “scale with constrained proportions”.
Seriously, I absolutely demand a response to this. It just isn’t on! Us PC users still haven’t had the promised patch for CS4 yet, and now CS5 is causing the same problems! I have replicated the error in another file, visible below. You can also download the raw bug.PNG file here.
March 27th, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Not sure I’ve had this issue. I find antialiasing fine. (Still get irritated every time text resizing doesn’t work tho). Do you wanna upload a few examples so I can see what you mean? Intrigued as to what problem you are getting…
March 25th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
While this is annoying, the most fundamental problem for me is absolutely terrible anti aliasing. It just plain sucks.
I am still using CS4 as this hasnt been addressed in CS5.
I just dont get why this has been ignored.
December 29th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
Yeh, I usually get round it by just selecting something else. If you have two things selected, the text bug doesn’t appear. Enjoy Fireworks – its an excellent tool!
December 29th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Hello, I’m new to FW, but I’ve just encountered the problem you wrote about, tried the workaround involving conversion to symbol, and discovered something else which might be of help: you can put the text object in a group (it can be the only object) and it will scale correctly. I guess this makes it easier to edit and adjust it than when it’s converted to a symbol, though I’m not sure as I’ve only just begun to learn Fireworks.
Thanks for writing this post, it helped a lot in making sense of what happened to my text
December 7th, 2010 at 10:13 am
Fireworks is my most loved graphics application. After many months of testing I think I’ve finally realised the problem.
For some reason the app performs very poorly on windows xp (sp3) At the office where I work we’re still on XP and well fireworks has been crashing on me so much lately that I was forced to switch to illustrator. (Photoshop handles to nonsensical for me) However at home on my Vista notebook and Win 7 box it performs perfectly fine.
I think the best thing you can do in the mean time is download fireworks Air backup utility.
September 8th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
I’m very aggravated by Fireworks CS5, is a big bag of shit that just keeps crashing and does silly things all the time. I feel like I’m spending more time working ahead of the bugs than doing real work. It’s so frustrating…
June 30th, 2010 at 1:27 am
CTRL+T to resize a text box? Never heard that one before. Change your workflow. You work for them.
June 1st, 2010 at 4:51 am
Hi Chris,
There actually is a pretty simple way to make your text scale the way you want it without adding distortion. I figured it out when the problem started showing up on one graphic I was working on. The trick is to resize the text box itself to make it longer than the text in question before you apply the scale. As long as the scale isn’t wider than the text box then the scale will work normally.
May 13th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
@Linus I am complaining because that’s clearly *not* a better workflow. Read the other comments, and you will see I have explained why that takes longer, is less intuitive, and thus a *worse* workflow than resizing text with the Transform tool.
In the manual for Fireworks, it says that the transform tool is for resizing “objects”. That’s all selectable items, bitmaps, vectors, text. The manual says – “You can transform text blocks in the same ways you can transform other objects. You can scale, rotate, skew, and flip text to create unique text effects“.
In other words, everyone here who says that its not part of the official Fireworks workflow is wrong. It is, and the manual confirms it.
May 13th, 2010 at 9:48 am
the text in FW does not need scale tool at all as it has the best text editing mode in my opinion. It has its own PI for text which you can set font sizes and other formatting and using drag handles around the textbox to increase textarea.
if you want more automation, please set shortcut keys to increase / decrease font sizes please.
Please do not complain when there are better workflow already.