Friends,

I do 95% of my illustration work in Xara, 5% in CorelDraw, and virtually none in Freehand 8, which I bought years ago before discovering Xara.

However, I occasionally get Illustrator EPS files from contract designers that I need to open for tweaking and exporting, preferably in Xara. Almost never is Xara able to open them well. About 80 percent of the time I can open them in Corel Draw, save as a WMF file, and open the WMF file in Xara. (I've also used CMX rather than WMF to pull into Xara, but WMF has generally worked better for me.) About 20 percent of the time I can't successfully pull them into Xara no matter how I export from Draw, and sometimes Draw can't open them at all.

In my experience, Freehand can almost never do the conversions correctly. I haven't tried Illustrator.

What do folks feel is the best program for converting the widest variety of vector files back and forth, with the end purpose of opening the files into Xara?

thanks,

james