Adobe FreeHand (formerly Macromedia FreeHand and Aldus FreeHand) was a computer application for creating two-dimensional vector graphics oriented primarily to professional illustration, desktop publishing and content creation for the Web. FreeHand was similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Designer Pro. Because of FreeHand’s dedicated page layout and text control features, it also compares to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. Professions using FreeHand include graphic design, illustration, cartography, fashion and textile design, product design, architects, scientific research, and multimedia production.

FreeHand was created by Altsys Corporation in 1988 and licensed to Aldus Corporation, which released versions 1 through 4. In 1994, Aldus merged with Adobe Systems and because of the overlapping market with Adobe Illustrator, FreeHand was returned to Altsys by order of the Federal Trade Commission. Altsys was later bought by Macromedia, which released FreeHand versions 5 through 11 (FreeHand MX). In 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia and its product line which included FreeHand MX, under whose ownership it presently resides.

Since 2003, FreeHand development has been discontinued; in the Adobe Systems catalog, FreeHand has been replaced by Adobe Illustrator.

FreeHand MX continues to run under Windows 7 using compatibility mode and under Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) within Rosetta, a PowerPC code emulator, and requires a registration patch supplied by Adobe . Freehand 10 runs without problems on Mac OS X 10.6 with Rosetta enabled, and does not require a registration patch. Someone using a later version of Mac OS X than 10.6 might be able to use VMware Fusion, VirtualBox or Parallels to virtualize Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server and run Freehand using this emulator.

Release history

• 1988: Aldus FreeHand 1.0
• 1988: Aldus FreeHand 2.0 (update: 2.0.2)
• 1988: Aldus FreeHand 3.0 (update: 3.1.1)
• 1988: Aldus FreeHand 4.0 (update: 4.0b)
• 1995: Macromedia FreeHand 5.0 (updates: 5.0.2 and 5.5)
• beta: Macromedia FreeHand 6.0
• 1996: Macromedia FreeHand 7.0 (update: 7.0.2)
• 1998: Macromedia FreeHand 8.0 (update: 8.0.1b)
• 2000: Macromedia FreeHand 9.0 (updates: 9.0.1 Mac and 9.0.2 Win)
• 2001: Macromedia FreeHand 10.0 (update: 10.0.1)
• 2003: Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand 11.0 (MX) (updates: 11.0.1 and 11.0.2 in 2004)