I was searching for a “quick fix” solution that would run natively in Mountain Lion and Mavericks and found iDraw.
This was really meant as a quick fix of files that I had already made into PDFs in FreeHand (running on separate Snow Leopard hard drive on my 2009 Mac Pro). iDraw, so far, has been able to open every FreeHand PDF I needed to change with the layers and gradients intact.
There are limitations, though, especially when it comes to exporting files.
In FreeHand, I have converted the text to outlines in order to print any PDFs I make, so sometimes, I have to go back to the original FreeHand file to locate the font.
iDraw is more a combination of Illustrator and FreeHand than what Adobe did for Illustrator after shutting down FreeHand development. When I opened one of my PDFs in iDraw where I flattened all layers to the Foreground layer, I found the “layers" in iDraw actually had a similar layers palette as Illustrator — each piece of the graphic was parked on its own layer from first to last.
I thought to myself at the time, “What a pain in the ass layering is going to be.” But then I opened a PDF where I left the original layers named and just like that, I had my layers with names!
The current issues I have with iDraw concern the colors palette. I find it as difficult to name and save a color to it as in Illustrator. Plus, changing colors of objects was driving me crazy… sometimes I could change a color with a click and other times I could not change the color to save my life.
I’m sending the makers of iDraw (http://www.indeeo.com) a note to see what the problem is and if it’s fixable.
The other cool thing about iDraw is they have a version for iPad.
I’m sure I’ll find other issues and differences that may be annoying, but I can't argue the price.
For a measly $24 I found an app that will allow me to fix or change FreeHand PDFs, save them to a variety of formats (PDF, PSD, SVG, PNG, GIF, JPG and TIFF), works in Mountain Lion and Mavericks, and has a version for my iPad, which is quite a bundle of potential.