Download Macromedia Freehand 10 Portable 238
Maryalice Cutcher
I received on an old Zip disk a FreeHand 9 file, which was created on Mac OS Classic around 2003. The file has no extension, only thanks to the file tool I was able to find out that it is in fact a Macromedia FreeHand 9 document. And while adding the extension fh9 doesn't give me the option to open it with Affinity Designer, the extension fh10 does. Sadly it says it is not supported.
Digital archeology at its finest. I wonder if that could be a sub section of media technology and IT studies one day, or even a university course of its own right. If you think of all the zettabytes of data currently stored on obsolete carriers.... Or the basic knowledge of a cure to some illness residing on a 12" floppy. A first version of a song or the voice of some politician or film star on a magnetized wire.
Problem + study exists already for a couple of years, perhaps when books, film and microfiche foils got digitized and PDF-A was invented. For instance -potsdam.de/en/studieren/fachbereiche/faculty-of-information-sciences/education/study-courses/archival-studies-ba/
There's also an online FH11 to PDF converter, but don't know if it is based on libfreehand or maybe some other lib here. Even can't tell if it works and how accurate that would be then at least for FreeHand 11 files, never used/tried that too.
Most things like libfreehand are build via formats reverse engineered tools like Re-lab (see also here and here for a small slideshare overview). So I believe most open source apps (Scribus, LibreOffice, etc.) and low cost third party tools, which deal with the FH file format, do all rely on libfreehand here. And the output of those is similar and just a matter of adaption to own app specific resembling drawing funtions.
What about a Virtual OSX i.e VirtualBox or Parallels using Snow Leopard and subsequently the install of Freehand MX in order to open and export to a more compliant file format, or at least be able to extract the elements.?
My workflow is (I'm working on an old intel MacPro with second harddisk booting with with OS 10.6.8, the last system supporting FH 11!):
Opening the FH files (down until FH 4) with FH 11 and storing als .FH11
Opening these files with Illustrator of the CS 4 (As far as I know the last Illustrator with FH importing plugin?) and storing as .ai
Now the world "is Yours"
Illustrator CS5 will open my old FH9 files quite fine, including multiple artboards. But back in the day I didn't use much of the more "esoteric" FH features, usually just plain vector shapes and text. From there I can save as AI-with-PDF and proceed to AD.
The current version may have likely been improved. I just tested on an fh9 draft of my logo (see my avatar) from 2000, and it opened just fine including objects outside the page on canvas. Transfer to Affinity seems to work best via SVG export. To include objects outside the page, select all and make sure Selection is enabled in the export dialog.
I am asking if anyone still working with this vector freehand program. I tried to install on my Mac OS 10.7 but could not. What I was told when trying to install it was that the Adobe Illustrator is now the continuation of Macromedia Freehand MX. I never used adobe illustrator before and I can not find it easy to apply my Freehand skills onto it. Fpr example in Freehand I can make a text encircle evenly but in Adobe Illustrator I hardly find tools to do the same. Please advise.
I started out with Aldus FreeHand, then gradually switched over to Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand before finally abandoning FreeHand when Adobe bought Macromedia and it became apparent that the writing was on the wall.
Its not a perfect replacement or clone of Freehand to be sure, but there is a fairly capable vector graphics editor called Gravit. ( ) It was originally designed by a team of Freehand enthusiasts, and incorporated most of the features of Freehand as well as some of Fireworks, which Adobe also killed off.
FreeHand (Adobe FreeHand, Macromedia FreeHand, Aldus FreeHand; it went through several owners) is a now-discontinued vector graphic editor for Windows and Mac. Its native file format is a proprietary one that does not appear to have ever been publicly documented; however, somebody apparently reverse-engineered it to create the libfreehand library to process it. As this library is open-source, examining the sources will probably give some insights into the file structure.
For FreeHand 7, 8, and 9, the first four bytes of the file will spell (in ASCII), AGD2, AGD3, and AGD4 respectively. In FreeHand 10, the text "FreeHand10" is within the first 24 bytes. Some other versions possibly also have "FreeHand" followed by a version number somewhere in the early part of the file. Also in early FreeHand formats LZW compression was used, so some files may have "ALDUS LZW" for the first few bytes.
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