Illustrator CC 2015 Installation issues

We do not currently officially support Illustrator CC 2015 because of the problems involved with installing the plugin. This page gives details of how you can work around these issues if you would like to use the plugin in Illustrator CC 2015. If you choose to follow these instructions you do so at your own risk and we accept no responsibilty for loss of any data. If you are unsure please wait for Adobe to release a version of Illustrator CC 2015 that fixes these issues.

The FreeHand Interface plugin is a type of hybrid plugin. This means it is made up of two parts:

  1. Creative Suite Extension used for the plugin windows. This can only be installed by the Extension Manager. There is one copy of this shared by all versions of Illustrator CC.
  2. Binary plugin that contains the code for opening FreeHand files. This should be installed by the Extension Manager, but can also be installed manually. Each version of Illustrator CC has its own copy of the binary plugin.

If Illustrator CC 2015 is the only CC version installed, the Extension Manager will not install the Creative Suite Extension. This is true of both verions of Illustrator CC 2015 (19.0.0 and 19.0.1). The Extension Manager would also not install the binary plugin for the initial 19.0.0 version of Illustrator CC 2015. The issue with the binary plugin not being installed was fixed with the 19.0.1 update to Illustrator CC 2015, but the Creative Suite extension is still not installed if this is the only CC version installed.

Steps to install the FreeHand interface plugin in Illustrator CC 2015

  1. Install at least one other version of Illustrator CC (original CC version or CC 2014)

    2. If you have not yet installed CC 2015 and you already have one or more CC versions installed you can choose to keep the previous versions when you install CC 2015.
    To install previous versions if you only have CC 2105, install from the "Previous versions" in the Creative Cloud application.

  2. Ensure you have the latest version of Illustrator CC 2015.

    3. Check if there is an update available in the Creative Cloud application

  3. Check that all the installed CC versions are listed in the CC Extension Manager "Products" list.

    4. If you don't see all the installed versions, you can use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool to clean up your CC Extension Manager installation. This is a very powerful tool. Please read the instructions about backing up your data on the web page.

  4. Install the plugin using the CC Extension Manager

Manual installation of the binary plugin

If the plugin is shown as installed in the CC Extenion Manager, but you do not see FreeHand listed in the drop down list of file types when opening a file then the binary plugin has not been installed. To install the binary plugin manually in any CC version including Illustartor CC 2015, download the zip files below, unzip and copy the files to the "Plug-ins/Illustrator Formats" folder.