FreeHand

Revision as of 14:33, 1 October 2021

FreeHand (Adobe FreeHand, Macromedia FreeHand, Aldus FreeHand; it went through several owners) is a now-discontinued vector graphic editor for Windows and Mac. Its native file format is a proprietary one that does not appear to have ever been publicly documented; however, somebody apparently reverse-engineered it to create the libfreehand library to process it. As this library is open-source, examining the sources will probably give some insights into the file structure.

Files are found in a number of extensions (and, for Mac versions, often with no extension at all), but the most common extensions are 'fh' followed by a version number, such as .fh10 for FreeHand 10.

Identification

Aldus FreeHand versions 1 & 2 were Macintosh only, so no official extensions are used.

For FreeHand 7, 8, and 9, the first four bytes of the file will spell (in ASCII), AGD2, AGD3, and AGD4 respectively. In FreeHand 10, the text "FreeHand10" is within the first 24 bytes. Some other versions possibly also have "FreeHand" followed by a version number somewhere in the early part of the file. Also in early FreeHand formats LZW compression was used, so some files may have "ALDUS LZW" for the first few bytes.

• Freehand Version 1 - acf3
• Freehand Version 2 - FHD2
• Freehand Version 3 - FH31
• Freehand Version 4 - AGD1
• Freehand Version 5 - AGD1
• Freehand Version 7 - AGD2
• Freehand Version 8 - AGD3
• Freehand Version 9 - AGD4
• Freehand Version 10 - FreeHand10
• Freehand Version 11 - FreeHand11

Sample Files

• Freehand 1,2 & 4 Sample Files
• Freehand 7 Software & Sample Files
• Freehand 8 Software & Sample Files
• https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/freeHandDrawing/

Programming libraries

• libfreehand: Library to process FreeHand files

Links

• Wikipedia article
• File extensions itemized
• Discussion of file format specs, or lack of same (archived)
• More discussion of FreeHand files