opening pdf's in freehand

[grnofslt]

I work for a manufacturing company who uses freehand 11, Office Express Arts and Letters, and Paint as their main production software all on a Windows 2000/xp computer system. Our art room has two computers and three people working in it, so it is small, but extremely busy.

Many of our customers send us their art work as PDF files. Freehand is supposed to open PDF files, but most times we go to open a PDF, we either see only an empty page, or we see a page with a rectangle with lines crossing from corner to corner. We have tried opening by using the open command, and import commands. We have tried to copy and paste, but still no luck to getting the pdf to open in freehand.

You may be asking why we have to take press ready files and open them in Freehand, well I will tell you. We use a service agency who also uses Freehand to have our flexograph plates made since we do not make our flexo mats in house. So we have to accomodate our service provider in this.

But there are freak times when we unexpectedly get a pdf to open up in Freehand and it is editable and we can send our service provider the freehand file from the pdf.

Why is it that PDFs will open sometimes and not others? What ar we missing? Is it something in how the pdf is being made that causes it to either open or not?

As of now our work flow is to open the pdf in Acrobat 7 and do our changes and then scan the pdf into a black and white bitmap file. WE then import the bitmaps into freehand to make the layout for how our flexo mats are supposed to be laid out. Then in the email we send to the service provider we tell then the distortion that we need for them to apply to this file, and we have to send them both the freehand file with the mat layout and the bitmaps that we had to make in order for them to make our flexo mats. Pain in the butt extra work that takes up much extra time.

I won't company bash, they don't like to spend money unless they have to. They do not have any of the creative suite except for Acrobat 7 and when they found out how much it would cost for them to purchase two licenses the decided not to purchase. I'm stuck in the stone age with these people.

Any help at how to get all pdf's to open in Freehand, or the peramerters that we need to demand of our customers in their setting up of their pdf's that we can open their files in freehand would be helpful

Thanks

Billy jay

[The Repro Kid]

This is just a wild guess, but maybe the ones that open were saved with the "Illustrator Editable" option checked, and the ones that won't did not use this option. I would also think the "embed all fonts" would need to used as well. My second guess would be that Freehand 11 is pretty darn old compared to the latest versions of Acrobat and maybe the ones that open were saved with Acrobat 5, 4 or 3 compatibility, which is around the version Acrobat was at when Freehand ceased to be upgraded. You don't need to be able to open an Illustrator file to test these theories, just get your hands on an Illustrator .eps file and run it through Distiller using various combinations of these settings until you produce a PDF you can open in Freehand, then use distiller to save these settings and send them to your clients. Even if some of your clients don't use distiller and can't load your saved settings, and just "save as" their files to PDF, they should be able to access all the settings you discover with your Distiller tests. You may even be able to re-distill your clients PDFs with your good settings if they are still not capable of saving correctly—you know how some clients are;) — I'm not sure about that though, I've never tried it. And about you're company not wanting to buy more software, you might want to point out to them that Freehand will never be upgraded again and it's life is officially over, and the day will come soon when it's use will no longer be an option — if you do a search on Freehand in the Adobe web site, a blurb comes up describing the product, but when you click on the "Buy Now" button, a totally blank "master page" type of skeleton page is all that comes up.

[grnofslt]

Hey Repro, Freehand 11 is also called Freehand MX and is what is available at Adobe's site this veryday and I am gong to drop the 100 bucks to purchase it as an upgrade.


I had the same wild guess abut pdfs being saved as Illustrator editable files. To be sure I work in a very sucky work flow, with one, a company who doesn't want to spend the money to upgrade the Art room properly, and two; with the lead art room tech not wanting to get involved with software that he knows nothing about. Oooops, there i go starting to rant again. I will make a couple pdf files tonight and see which are the ones that open within freehand. I will focus on embedded fonts and Illustrator editible.

thanks again for your help

Billy Jay