Vector Patterns

I am in and out of Illustrator frequently during my working day but I always use Xara as my first port of call in the design process. Many times a in a month I use Illy to produce a repeating pattern for a fill and its all vector keeping the file size down. I would like this to be done in Design Pro as an Xara produced PDF is smaller than Adobe.

I know that people who read this thread will say why don't use Xaras bitmap fill and yes it works but to get the file size down requires you to Create a Bitmap Copy of your pattern and then delete the pattern. This cause problems and more work if the resulting PDF is scaled up for a different document like a poster. It would be also handy for the people who produce web pages for both navigation backgrounds and page design before the export to publish web sites. I know the developers would make a better job of it than they have in Illustrator and it would be so nice to see in Design Pro

This would be very useful indeed, but only when it doesn't have too much of an impact on redraw speed. I sometimes use vectors as fills by copying and pasting them, but this quickly leads to a enormous amount of objects, which can easily bring Xara to its knees. Especially when the vectors get a bit complex.

agree both posts

[grouping can sometimes, but not always, improve redraw speed]

As a newbie, I hope this is sufficiently related to the current post for adding my two cents. In another forum a user wanted a vector format swatch of sand texture for use on a tee shirt design. Certain sample were posted by others. only one of which. was deemed usable as vector and others were rejected as bitmaps.. I couldn't tell the difference visually. How does one know?. My way-back version of Xara, the Corel early version, had fills of sand in the guide book and on CD. Are samples just called fills always vectors and bitmap fills stated as such?. I am now using Xara Xtreme 4.