FreeHand

File Format
Name	FreeHand
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics FreeHand
Extension(s)	.fh3, .fh4, .fh5, .fh7, .fh8, .fh9, .fh10, .fh11
PRONOM	x-fmt/303, x-fmt/304, x-fmt/53, fmt/544, fmt/545, fmt/546, fmt/547, fmt/400
Type Code	AGD1
Released	1988

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.

Version	Extension	Year	Header	PRONOM	Opens
1		1988	acf3	fmt/1449
2		1988	FHD2	fmt/1450
3	FH3	1991	FH31	x-fmt/303
4	FH4	1994	AGD1	x-fmt/304
4 & 5	FH5	1995	AGD1	x-fmt/53
7	FH7	1996	AGD2	fmt/544
8	FH8	1998	AGD3	fmt/545	FH3-8
9	FH9	2000	AGD4	fmt/546	FH5-9
10	FH10	2001	FreeHand10	fmt/547
11 (MX)	FH11	2003	FreeHand11	fmt/400

Sample Files & Software

• Freehand 1,2 & 4 Sample Files
• Freehand 7 Software & Sample Files
• Freehand 8 Software & Sample Files
• https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/freeHandDrawing/
• Freehand 9 Trial Needed to migrate older FH5 files.

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