I was recently delighted to find that CS6 could easily open my old (15 years) Corel Draw files.

If it can do that, why can't it open Freehand files?

I agree. Just installed CS6 today and luckily still kept my CS5.5.

We also have years and years worth of freehand files on our servers that we often need to open up and translate to Illustrator files. Please please fix this! Telling clients that we can't open their files anymore because Adobe changed their programs would simply not suffice :-)

Agreed. We have 20 years worth of Freehand files we need to access and convert. This isn't just a once-in-a-while occurance, it's daily. I'm testing out the CS6 trial, but if there's no conversion capability, we'll be sticking with CS5 for the forseeable future.

I have 18 years of Freehand Files that cannot be opened in CS6 as well.  Big part of our business.  We used Freehand because it was better than AI and could do much more from a page layout and vector illustration app. Was very dissapointed when Adobe trashed the application.  AI is much better now with multi page layous, but is still arduously slow in comparision.  PLEASE keep the ability to open the docs Adobe.....

Ok, so I´m not alone with this huge problem (We have only thousands of those fh-files in our archive). Only way now is to go back to CS5.5!

I agree too. We have lots of original artwork in Freehand that we need to dig up from the archives somewhat frequently. Very sad to see this feature wasn't carried into CS6.

Does Adobe offer the ability to give an additional license for previous Illustrator releases, i.e. 5.1 or 5.5, in order to support this removed ability?
Somebody could have just bought Adobe Creative Suite CS6 from scratch, not an update, and couldn't open his tons of Freehand files archived for a dozen or more years.

Sometimes license agreement acceptation at installation process may include also the entitlement to install even the older releases of a software, without buying another license. It looks like you can do it with Microsoft. In case of such downgrade could be available, these could be also the issue to buy an older license, because it's somewhat impossible from the online frontend of software resellers or Adobe website.

Exactly, I've used 'collect for output' out of Freehand for what feels like a decade.  They just now have the package feature and to my knowledge, only creative cloud users have that feature!

Um.... hello. The point is that I have already paid to upgrade to CS6. I don't want to have to buy another program (specially not Coreldraw) and I want to get rid of my older versions of adobe. This is no solution.

The point is that Adobe offered us an upgraded program with key features missing. This is unacceptable from a company like Adobe, and we're still not hearing anything from them about fixing it.

Just upgraded from CS5.1 to CS6, and I, too, was stunned to see this functionality removed.  Clearly, I'm not the only former FreeHand user that fully expected this feature to remain, at least for another version or two.

We transitioned our production workflow from FH to AI very soon after Adobe bought Macromedia, and can't tell you how happy we were when Adobe included this feature in Illustrator.  No more running FreeHand alongside Illustrator!  Unfortunately, now we're running CS 5 alongside CS6 for this purpose.  And yes, we save these files as Illustrator once opened, but we have so many years of FreeHand files, numbering in the thousands, that we'll be coming across them for a long time to come.

No, this isn't the end of the world, of course, but anyone working in a production environment - especially the former FH users of the world - understands how incredibly helpful this feature is in CS5.

I have a solutiojn of the problem:

Open FreeHand and open a FreeHand-file

File >> Export  and save as Illustrator-file.

This file can be opened in Illustrator 6

A lot of success

If you consider keeping multiple versions of the application or an older OS it works but the issue here is that Adobe abondened Freehand and now Freehand files and it creating a lot of pain for a lot of people.

Agree. - Also: I can't see an advantage for Adobe to quit this ability to open .fh files. Plenty of maps, illustrations etc. get lost and will barely become re-created in Illustrator.

- thomas

Yes! We haven't updated to 6 yet but being able to open Freehand files is essential.

Adobe underestimates the value of Freehand and refuses to accept it. I would rather prefer them to focus on the daily use and time-saving features instead of the fancy ones that most designers barely need.

I’d like to add my voice to this chorus, having just discovered that my archives of Freehand files are no longer accessible without major hassle.

The return of this feature is valueable to me.

I have decades of Freehand files that need this convenience.

Ifnot I'll need to intall CS 5  to get this finctionality.

I only started using Illustrator when it got the ability to open Freehand files, because of the huge amout of these I have in backup.

I did not waste my precious time converting them all to .ai, because I have better things to occupy myself with. So why the hell would this feature be removed in CS6? Did it occupy a precious 1MB of space, that did not fit in the DVD???

I would urge Adobe to stop alienating its clients, and stop trying to force them to do what they want, instead of giving its clients what they need.

In the ever changing landscape of software, one of these days a new product will arrive, and  even if it's not necessarily better than adobe programs, if they treat their users better, then people will prefer them.

A good example of this is the 3D animation program Blender, which year by year is gaining more and more users, in favor of big companies like Maya, 3DStudio Max or Softimage.