[birdman]

My employer is, at long last, looking into getting me a new Mac for my graphics and layout work. However, due to (de facto) company policy of never upgrading software, everything I use is in Classic, which means we'll also need to buy new software for said Mac.

Most of our page layout is fairly simple and has been done in Freehand 8 for the last few years, while more extensive pieces like catalogs have been done in QuarkXPress 4. I would *love* to move to InDesign anyway, so this new computer system is a good way to force the issue.

Anyhow, I'm curious if InDesign, as part of CS3, can import a Freehand 8 file. I understand Illustrator will, but will it bring in all the pages? And will the text boxes still be linked and editable? We may be better off buying Freehand MX so we can open and print old files, but recreate our templates in InDesign for future projects. Unfortunately, upgrade pricing only applies to Freehand 9 and 10.

-birdman

[Oisín]

If Illustrator can import the Freehand file properly (with all pages and editability preserved)—which I’m not sure if it will, having never used Freehand—you can just import everything into InDesign as the resulting Illustrator files, rather than the original Freehand files.

[scottiB]

AFAIK, Illustrator CS3 can't handle multiple pages files like FH could. You could try exporting the FH files as EPS, with multi-page docs exporting as separate pages, which you'd have to do manually. These, you could import into AI or ID.

Congrats on the new work machine. Don't skimp on the RAM.

[birdman]

Thanks for your help, and here's a follow-up. I got the new machine this week, a 24" iMac with 2 GB of RAM. Plenty speedy for what I do here, and far better than the clone-era SuperMac I started with, or the 800 MHz Quicksilver I inherited last year. Now I get to use a version of Photoshop written this millennium.

Anyhow, I opened a Freehand 8 file in Illustrator CS3, and while only the first page was on a "page" in Illustrator, the rest of the data was imported. That is, everything was on the pasteboard exactly where it would have been in Freehand; Illustrator just doesn't see them as pages. Not exactly seamless migration, but not too horrid.

-birdman

[birdman]

Of course I spoke too soon... Basic text is fine, but I just opened one with linked text boxes and graphic elements embedded in the text. The text boxes were there, but all the text was within a single box, so I had to re-link. The embedded graphics were kinda funky too, and runarounds seem to have been lost.

I may want to keep the old machine around, or buy a copy of Freehand MX, so I can export these pages as EPS or Illustrator files first. That may work better.

-birdman