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• • November 27, 2009 at 10:23 am #54031
    Brian Wells

    Participant

    Is there a way to convert Freehand MX files to InDesign?

  • November 27, 2009 at 11:11 am #54032
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Freehand is an illustrator program, and it's quite unlikely you can 'convert' artwork to native InDesign stuff.

    However, it should not be necessary. I don't think you can import (“Place”, in Indesign's parlance) native Freehand documents in InDesign (– have you tried?), but it should be possible to save the original files as something you can place in ID: Adobe Illustrator AI, PDF, or (when all else fails) EPS.

    Adobe on Freehand: “No updates to FreeHand have been made for over four years, and Adobe has no plans to initiate development to add new features or to support Intel-based Macs and Windows Vista.”

    If you want to be able to edit the files in a more modern package, try converting it to Illustrator instead. That should not be a problem at all, since Illustrator is an artwork design package as well. You can try opening the original file immediately, or use one of the other file types as above.

  • November 27, 2009 at 11:29 am #54033
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Yep Jongware hit it on the head

    You could try the PDF2ID talked about here https://www.creativetechs.com/i…..df2id.html

    That's really the only way I can think of.

    The other way would be to export all the Text as RTF if you can (long time since I opened Freehand). If you can't you can still create a PDF and save the file as a RTF. Place the RTF into InDesign.

    It's bit a of work, but if you can separate the text from the graphics then go from there. PDF2ID would probably be the easiest way.

  • November 27, 2009 at 12:07 pm #54035
    valedot

    Member

    Hello everyone,
    regarding vector illustrations the best thing for me is to do as he says Jonguare, converted by AI, the text is not necessary to rtf, just select it with the text tool, copy and paste into ID (by setting your preferences to keep all information ) in ID Set zero return wrong…
    guides are converted into objects in FH and pasted into ID (Paste in Place)
    ID in the lines will be converted with a script (AddGuides)
    all this to have an ID file and not an AI file

    be patient for English, has translated google

    
    valentino

  • November 30, 2009 at 12:43 pm #54052
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    As far as the sticky situation of opening Freehand files in Illustrator, export from Freehand as Freehand 9 and all will be well. See the Adobe site for the pdf detailing all points about Freehand to Illustrator migration.

  • November 30, 2009 at 1:22 pm #54054
    Adi Ravid

    Participant

    Tim Hughes said:

    As far as the sticky situation of opening Freehand files in Illustrator, export from Freehand as Freehand 9 and all will be well. See the Adobe site for the pdf detailing all points about Freehand to Illustrator migration.

    ---

    Exporting to FH9 is only needed for CS2 or earlier.

    CS3 and CS4 have no problem to open FH10 and MX files.

  • November 30, 2009 at 1:30 pm #54055
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    @Adi, cool I only had to do this a few times when I was using CS2, good info cheers.

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