Thomas Bohn Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 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. I guess my only chance would be to find an old Mac with FreeHand 9 to actually see the file and create an PDF for my archive, which is my aim for this project. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 You can try if Scribus opens that one correctly. - See also related ... How to open your old FreeHand files for free Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Bohn Posted January 2, 2021 Author Share Posted January 2, 2021 Yeah, I just tried Scribus, it can open the file but the file might be too complex, I think I need to find another way. But thanks anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slammer Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 Digital archeology at it´s finest. I wonder if that could be a sub section of media technology and IT studies one day, or even a university course of it´s 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. How do you get a Bernoulli box to handshake with Windows 10? Thomas Bohn 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 I think Coreldraw will import Freehand files, maybe upload a freehand file here so that we can tinker. Quote iMac 27" 2019 Sequoia 15.0 (24A335), iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asan Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 I have had some luck opening Freehand files in Illustrator and saving as an older version of Illustrator then opening the file in Designer. It will require some cleaning up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 There are some services on the net which claim to can convert FreeHand files from any FreeHand version to any later version or to Illustrator files. - See: Free FreeHand File Checker Tensai AI Plugins - FreeHand Plugin for AI However, I don't know how good or accurate that converter is, never tried that, but maybe it does the job (who knows). Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thomaso Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 12 hours ago, Thomas Bohn said: I just tried Scribus, it can open the file but the file might be too complex, I think I need to find another way. One more (free) option: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libfreehand "Libfreehand is a library that parses the file format of Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. It supports documents from version 3 to 11." 6 hours ago, Slammer said: Digital archeology at it´s finest. I wonder if that could be a sub section of media technology and IT studies one day, or even a university course of it´s own right. 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 https://www.fh-potsdam.de/en/studieren/fachbereiche/faculty-of-information-sciences/education/study-courses/archival-studies-ba/ Quote macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 2, 2021 Share Posted January 2, 2021 3 hours ago, thomaso said: One more (free) option: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libfreehand "Libfreehand is a library that parses the file format of Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. It supports documents from version 3 to 11." Additionally: Even it is first of all a library, it comes together with a converter tool fh2svg which converts FreeHand format files to SVG ... Quote Usage: fh2svg [OPTION] INPUT Options: --help show this help message --version show version information Report bugs to <https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/>. ----------------- fh2svg your.fh9 > your.svg Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lacerto Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 (...) thomaso, Fixx and firstdefence 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 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. Affinity and FH file format? - Well better forget that, looks pretty unusable! Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 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.? Quote iMac 27" 2019 Sequoia 15.0 (24A335), iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 Found a FH11 file at Adobe's site, which looks like this ... gradient_start.FH11 ... and feeded that into the online FH11 to PDF converter, result is ... gradient_start.pdf ... which looks more to be an thumbnail image than vectors at all! - Probably would have got the same with XnView too. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jweitzel Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 As far as I know ...: There was a jump between all older FH versions and FH 11. 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" For sure there are "design glitches". But If you have maps for thousands of $ in FH5 ... Johannes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lacerto Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 (...) v_kyr 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lacerto Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 (...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 1 hour ago, Lagarto said: ...will be converted to mere low-res thumbnail on this site. Then it's an unusable online service, since a thumbnail image can also be shown locally by tools like GC or XNviewMP etc. On Macs fh10 files can also be previewed (thumb images) via the Apple Finder (quickview) or Preview.app. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
loukash Posted February 4, 2021 Share Posted February 4, 2021 On 1/3/2021 at 1:15 PM, jweitzel said: Illustrator of the CS 4 (As far as I know the last Illustrator with FH importing plugin?) 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. Alternatively for FH Mac version: get SheepShaver install Mac OS 9 install FH9 clean up and simplify your original files as far as possible print to PostScript or export as EPS convert to PDF directly in MacOS Preview (Affinity may have issues to directly interpret certain old EPS files correctly) edit in Affinity Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henry FLurry Posted January 25 Share Posted January 25 LibreOffice 7.6 just opened my FH9 file. It was a very simple file, admittedly. I then exported it as SVG which I could import into Affinity Designer 2. Of course - it lost its parameters for creating the shapes, but now I have it in vector and separated by groups and objects. loukash 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
loukash Posted January 25 Share Posted January 25 5 hours ago, Henry FLurry said: LibreOffice 7.6 just opened my FH9 file. It was a very simple file, admittedly. I remember having tried LibreOffice before but then it failed. Or so it seemed to me: it may have been a too complex document… 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. Other than that, FH9 runs pretty well in SheepShaver even on my new MacBook Air 15". It's just the conversion to Affinity that is a bit problematic since PDF export in FH9 was mediocre at best, and abysmal at worst… Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nico629 Posted June 24 Share Posted June 24 Libre Office opens Freehand files better than Scribus in its Draw mode. It is also open source and free to download and use. As with Scribus, very complex illustrations may not manifest properly, but simple files are still editable. I hope that helps. Kind regards Nick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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