How do I open macromedia freehand file?

Hi Yousuf Areff,

Affinity Designer will open Freehand files with editing ability or Illustrator 5.5 or below.

hope this helps

The current, free LibreOffice v5.1.2.2 will open Freehand *.fh, *.fh1 through *.fh9 files.

1) Run Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine such as Parallels, VMware, or the free VirtualBox. SL Server is available from Apple for $20. Call to purchase. Then, if you're lucky, you can find a full installer of Freehand MX 11.0.2 (the last ever version of Freehand to be released) as a 30 day trial to install in the VM under SL Server. Launch Freehand and open your file. If you want, you can download the Snow Leopard registration fix. This is a direct download link from Adobe's site. You install Freehand MX first, quit, then replace the unregistered file it creates with the "fix", which is actually a permanent activation file.

Downside. It's hit or miss if Freehand will work under Snow Leopard. Adobe says it no workee in Snow Leopard. It works for some, but not others, so they just declared it unsupported. There's a fair number of posts in their forums on the same topic with pretty much the same answers. Some users have little, or no problem getting it to work in SL, and others can't get it to run at all.

2) Purchase the Tensai AI Plugin for Freehand converter. There is no demo, but many users on Adobe's forums praise it. It appears to support only the CC or CS6 versions or Illustrator.

Hadn't heard that! Can't beat free, especially if it works well.

Does it open Freehand files as editable vector art, or does it flatten them as a raster image? I presume under the Draw module you can work on your Freehand files as editable vector art?

Kurt,

If you just launch LibreOffice, and then choose Open File, you can click on the File Type selector and see the plethora of file types that LibreOffice supports.

I have a rather simple FreeHand 11 file here that is just a shape diagram. I can select individual components of that Shape, and manipulate them in LO Draw. A right-click on any shape has a Convert sub-menu with its own options (e.g. bitmap, etc.).

In Draw, selecting View menu : Page pane, I also can show document thumbnails. This also comes in handy when opening multi-page PDF documents in Draw.

Have you had any better luck that this, VikingOSX? I installed Freehand 11.0.2 in Snow Leopard and opened all of the sample images, then exported each to a TIFF. I then opened all of the Freehand 11 sample documents in LibreOffice. To say the results were dismal is an understatement. On each of the below, the image on the left is how the document opens in Freehand, and the right comparison is what you get in LibreOffice.

To be fair, Freehand itself does a wretched job exporting its own files to anything but a flattened TIFF. Any other vector format, including generic EPS opens as nothing you would expect in Illustrator or any other vector editing app.

Would the Tensai plug-in do any better? Can't say, and have no intention of spending $57 to find out since I have no use for it myself.

Kurt,

I believe that you and I have immeasurably higher reproduction quality standards than the OpenGL 1.0 garbage standard at LibreOffice for Freehand file support. If I had any quality Freehand files (as what you posted) to test against LibreOffice, I would have decisively withheld any LO recommendation.

That is beyond crap. 👿

😁

I just wanted to test and see what LibreOffice could do. I thought maybe I was missing a step or setting.

I had also pulled off a bunch of much simpler samples from my Freehand 9 DVD. LibreOffice didn't do any better with those. But unlike just about anything else I tried to open Freehand files with, at least LibreOffice made an attempt and opened something.

Hello Yousuf,

I did more testing today to see what else may help. This time I exported all of the sample Freehand images I was using for testing to Editable EPS. This does work, but they have two major problems when opening the files in Illustrator:

1) If the images were built as RGB, they do stay in that color mode, but all color gets reduced to the nearest CMYK equivalent. Someone at Macromedia apparently decided that if you're saving as an EPS, well, then you must be going to press with it.

2) It saves the converted EPS file as thousands, or millions of overlapping triangles. They become incredibly complex and large files. So in a technical sense, they're editable. In truth, you couldn't possibly edit them in any meaningful way.

So then I went on to test number two. I knew Illustrator used to open Freehand files itself, so had to find out when that was taken out. The answer is, CS5 was the last version of Illustrator that would open Freehand files. Since I had that on hand, I installed it to test.

The basic answer to that is, "How complex are your Freehand files?". Some of the acid test images seen above, such as the '20s flapper girl and the Mideast princess didn't open well, although it did a pretty darn good job on the night beach scene. The blimp image opened almost perfectly. They faucets and the Fleur de Lis looking thing were a perfect match to how they open in Freehand 11. Just about anything I opened from my Freehand 9 disk opened perfectly in Illustrator as again, these were much less complex art.

So it all depends on how complex your standing images are. If they're all fairly simple, you could set up an action in Illustrator CS5 to open your Freehand files and then save them back out to Illustrator art. An action will run through an entire folders worth of stuff so you don't have do each drawing manually, one at a time. All of your Freehand files will then be in a much more modern, and more importantly, a supported file format. Also a plus is that since Illustrator CS3 (I think that's the right one), native Illustrator .ai files are actually PDFs, just with a different extension so they open back up in Illustrator when double clicked. You can take any .ai file from CS3 or later, change the extension from .ai to .psd and it will open in Preview or the Acrobat Reader as if it were always a PDF (since it is).