As a graphic artist, I cannot live without FreeHand for both speed and ease of operation. Its simplicity hides its enduring usability, which is a go to tool for graphics professionals not wanting Adobe overkill and bloat. So I am glad FreeHand Forum is maintained to share hints and tips. One of which I am finding invaluable today.
I often convert and make icons for game design. Since Flash has been dropped, SVG format has become the new standard for high quality web based graphics. I use FreeHand as my initial design tool and - when ready, use INKSCAPE as a Free Vector graphics tool with a wide range of options (and must be said a horrible interface) which works quite well in importing PDF FreeHand files which can be edited or exported in all other formats -including SVG.
One caveat is that INKSCAPE uses SVG (natively) as the default format to save and edit files. So you need to ‘save’ as the other option ‘plain’ SVG.
Using ‘plain’ SVG which then export the graphic, - and not the whole page. Also when exporting from FreeHand you need to select your graphic and then EXPORT to PDF by ticking ‘Select objects only’ when exporting to INKSCAPE.
So that’s it really. You now have the best of all worlds. It keeps FreeHand current and INKSCAPE seems to import all the colours and vectors are maintained. Fonts may need to be checked for kerning and accuracy (its not as good for text edits due to leading mismatch). But as a back end file saver this keeps FreeHand bang up to date.
To date I have produced two published books using primarily using this technique.
INKSCAPE is well maintained, and can be used on its own, however it is no match for FreeHand ease of use. But the two together solves a lot of problems.
Finally thank you for keeping the freehand forum open. I hope this helps all us old professionals who prefer the FreeHand usability.
I Use it on Elementary os LINUX, (on an iMac) and also another on my old G5 PPC (there is an old Power PC version I use on TIGER 10.4). There are versions for most systems. Mac, Linux, and Windows (both 32 bit and 64 bit) are all supported.
https://inkscape.org/