First off, Flash 5 can now open native FreeHand files from versions 7-9 with near perfection. This means no more exporting as SWF or Adobe Illustrator files to retain layers and object information. If you are using FreeHand 10 and Flash 5, you'll need to export your art as v7-9 files to import.

In the sample above, I've tried to create all kinds of different objects to see how they would convert into Flash 5. This includes, Layers, Symbols, Lens Fills, Paste Insides, and Dashed Strokes. The colors are all CMYK mixtures.

In Flash 5, you just create a new document and Import the art from the Import dialog shown above.

Flash 5 will then give you this FreeHand Import dialog as shown above. As you can see, you have a great deal of control on how the art is imported. Most of these options are pretty self explanatory and I won't go over all of them in any detail.

One thing I like here, is that you can choose to keep Layers intact, turn them into Keyframes, or Flatten the whole image. Also that you can choose to turn pages into Scenes is very handy for creating larger Flash sites you may have worked on in FreeHand.

Above is the artwork after imported. OUCH! Those colors sure don't look too great, but it is easily fixable and I go into more detail on that later.

As you can see, everything came in perfectly. The Lens fills show up fine and even the Paste Insides at the top of the logo are intact. One thing that many will find extremely nice is that the dashed stroke came in as a dashed stroke and not solid. I will cover what happened with each object later and how some of these things were converted. But first, let's go over the Layers, Page placement and Guides.

Flash will import your art aligned with the top left corner of it's original placement. If you have a special page size, then get those numbers from the Page Inspector palette as shown above, and write them down somewhere. Also note what measurement system you are using as well.

Guides will also be imported exactly how you have them placed from the top left corner. Good to remember when creating your art and bring it in later.

In Flash, go under the Modify menu -> Movie. You will get the Movie Properties dialog shown above. Enter in the page size you wrote down in the Dimensions and select the Ruler Units that you used in the FreeHand document.

Once imported, you can see that the guides are in the exact location and that the Guide layer was imported as a true Flash guide layer. Very nice!

Back in the FreeHand document, you can see that the art is sitting on various layers. The Logo and Text layers are locked. The Logo layer is also set to be in Keyline view.

Flash 5 is so smart about the Layer import, it keeps layers locked as well as in Keyline view as shown above. Awesome!

Note, that Flash will still keep it's default layer, Layer 1. You can safely remove this if you don't want it.

Remember this yucky color conversion? Well it's very easy to fix in FreeHand before you import.

The colors I used are created using CMYK mixtures as shown above in the Colors palette. Flash isn't very smart about converting CMYK colors, so you have to give it something it does understand, RBG colors.

To fix this, just convert your colors to RBG from the Options pulldown menu in the Colors palette. In FreeHand 9, you can select all of your colors and quickly convert them in one step. Don't be alarmed by any color shifting you see in FreeHand, it will look just like you intended in Flash.

Then you can either Save the document or Save as a new one. Once you've done that, just Undo any changes.

Now once imported into Flash 5, those colors are looking exactly how I wanted them to. Compare it with the FreeHand drawing shown before.

I don't think that the color conversion would be considered a bug, since Flash works in an RBG only color space. So just remember this quick workaround before you bring FreeHand art into Flash 5.

Now it's time to look at some of those objects one at a time to see how they were converted. Above are those clipping paths that I mentioned. They are just simple gradient fills clipped in the polygon shapes.

In Flash 5, these clipping paths are added to the Library palette as Symbols shown above. They are automatically put into a FreeHand Object group, and sit in a sub group called Clip Paths. This is just Flash's way of keeping everything organized for you.

When you edit one of these Symbols, you'll notice that Flash converted this clipping path into it's own method of doing the same thing, using Masks.

The clipping path has actually turned into a Masking object while the gradient sits on the layer underneath the mask. How smart is that?!

The Dashed Stroke that I used is a pretty basic 2 point stroke with a predefined dash as shown above. It has a Squared Cap which is very important, and I'll explain in a bit.

In Flash, the stroke comes in as a native Dashed stroke as shown above, keeping the spacing and width. Now remember, this was a pretty basic dashed stroke, and Flash still has problems with certain dashed strokes from FreeHand.

First, when zoomed in on the stroke, you'll notice that the dashes are now rounded. Why Flash 5 doesn't have the ability to create squared strokes is still a mystery only the beta testers can explain. So be aware of this when trying to import really fat strokes with dashes, they won't look very good.

Also, be careful with strokes that have custom spacing like the examples shown above. Flash 5 only allows a custom spacing with 2 options. Any strokes imported like shown above, will only be solid in Flash.

If you need squared dashes then the best thing you can do is to export the line as an SWF file, and turn on the option to Trace Dashed Strokes. For some reason FreeHand still doesn't like to export custom spaced dashes in SWF format.

FreeHand 9 introduced the ability to create Symbols and place multiple instances of them in your art like shown above. FreeHand 10 now has a Library palette much like the Flash version. Before Flash 5, FreeHand Symbols didn't import as native Flash Symbols.

Well, I'm happy to say that Flash 5 now keeps FreeHand Symbols intact when imported, adding them to the Library palette as shown above.

Any editable text from FreeHand will be completely editable in Flash 5 too. Point sizes, leading and kerning all come over fine. You have to be aware that Flash 5's letter kerning (or spacing) is defined quite a bit differently, and I'm still not sure how it's determined coming from a Desktop Publishing background.

Here's another thing to watch out for. If you have any text that has a custom Horizontal Scale like shown above, you should be careful here. Flash 5 doesn't recognize this kind of formatting and will just import it like regular text.

However, when you import the art, just turn off the option Maintain Text Blocks in the FreeHand Import dialog (shown at top of page). The text will come in fine as an object, though the text will not be editable.

Lens fills are always a fun addition to art in FreeHand. Above are the Lens fills that I used. Upon inspection, you can see that the top fill is a Transparency Lens with 20% Opacity applied.

Converted to Flash, they retain their transparency. In Flash it's called Alpha as shown above in the Color Mixer palette.

Tile fills would not import correctly into previous versions of Flash. Above I've created a simple Tile fill containing Star shapes.

Imported into Flash 5, the Fill takes on the form of a series of Symbols in the Flash library. If you were to further edit this, you'll notice that in fact it's a Mask/Symbol combination that mimics the Tile fill.

The above path is pretty simple. It has a pretty extreme curve point in the middle as shown with the control handles extended.

Above is the same path Copied and Pasted into Flash 5. It may be hard to distinguish the problem just by glancing at it...

... until I superimpose the FreeHand shape underneath the Flash version (shown as Red outline). This is a pretty significant bug, and there hasn't been any real explanation as to why this happens. It only seems to occur with pretty extreme curves and how Flash draws them with it's own Bezier controls.

So watch carefully when your art imports and how curves are affected.

Thanks to Judy Arndt for finding this one.

With the Flash Anti-Aliased view mode (v9 shown above), you could see how certain objects would look when converting to Flash as shown above. Well I'm happy to say, that it's now out-of-date with the release of Flash 5 as I've shown you.