I have worked together with a ad-agency on a couple of projects, and a few issues have come up: They of course don't use Xara X, but mainly Freehand and sometimes Illustrator. My part have been to create some components of a final picture, while the agency take care of other details, and then they merge all components of the picture.

They wanted me to send my part in a file format they could open and edit it (yes, they had my permission to edit my part of the work), and they suggested PDF.

I have Acrobat and tried different ways to create a PDF: a) by printing to PDF-writer; b) by printing to file and then creating a PDF of the PRN-file; and c) printing to Acrobat Distiller.

I also tried exporting as EPS, and then distilling that file. And I tried saving as an Illustrator file (AI, artificial intelligense indeed [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img] ).

It doesn't matter in what format I save/export, there is always something that doesn't work: The PDF:s splitted the outlines into thousands (well, perhaps only hundreds) of pieces and converted gradient fills to lines of bitmaps.

The image I did wasn't even complex: It was a head of a swan, where the oulines where strokes brushed to achieve the effect of a hand-drawn image. I converted the outlines to shapes to get around possible problem when exporting, but it didn't help. I used two gradient fills: one linear and one circular (and they weren't even overlapping, but still got messed up).

With that info, does anyone have any tips how to save/export images so they can be opened in Freehand for editing?

I can post the original file if anyone have the time to take a look.

PS. We got the work done, but there was a lot of unnecessary working around that hopefully can be avoided in the future.

-Paul