1 reply to this topic

[Fred van Eck]

Hi, I'm a new member to your respected community. Because I have a burning question I'll start it right away: the problem is the conversion for text from good old Freehand MX (or any prevvious version) to illustrator (10 or CS). As many of you may know original complete textblocks break apart or do not take the original space (so they may not be shown at all in Illustrator). This problem cannot be tackled by choosing options, upon import, such as "Updating" or any equivalent of that. Nor can it be asailed wwhhen trying to export it as a Ill.version from FreeHand...Somewhere along the line you will be facing this problem. Given the lack of future (cartographically highly unfavourable) for FreeHand this question may grow to be a significant and troublesome one. It is therefore I hope to hear of someone who has been there before and possibly be able to supply with an answer or method that might make life a lot easier in a Macromedialess world...! thanks for bearing with me, Fred van Eck

[Martin Gamache]

Fred,

I would suggest you convert your text to outlines in FH if you want to preserve appearance and also duplicate the text on a separate layer for having a backup and also having editable text. Once in Illy you can use your intact text layers to modify anything you need to change, yes...you will have to concatenate broken text and re-kern labels....there is no solution to this yet. But it beats re-typing. If you have huge files or huge amounts of changes to make this may not be practical but for the average small map updates it should be a workable solution.

your other option is to keep a machine to run legacy versions of FH to do your work and create PDFs for printing purposes to deal with Printers that wont accept FH files.

Neither option is pretty but neither is FH being bought by Adobe, OS changes, type incompatibilites, new type engines, but...not much we can do about those things.