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Greetings,
I'm trying to ascertain whether the latest iteration of Xara's magnificent drawing program has the capability/sophistication to do a good job of putting together a magazine, from start to finish. Is there anyone out there who has actually succeeded in doing such a thing? Please advise me.
Thanks muchly,
Frankonio
"the capability/sophistication to do a good job of putting together a magazine, from start to finish"?
Tri-fold Brochures, flyers, posters, newletters, business cards, letter heads, calendars, small websites, yes!! - and very well.
Here's what Xara say in their Help File.
Attachment 56264
And Welcome to the TG Forums Frank..
Hi, version 4 has some of the basic features of DTP packages, but isn't (yet) intended to be a suitable replacement for dedicated DTP packages used by power DTP users. It can make perfectly DTP-like documents reasonably easily. There are numerous threads outlining what people think is currently lacking (e.g. master pages, smart cloning of objects [a.k.a. symbols] etc.) but it is likely these will be developed in future Xara itterations. The Xara help files/webpage, as Sledger points out, demonstrate the kinds of DTP-related things Xara is currently good for.
I believe desktop publishing works well when you can choose to either link external images to the document or choose to embed them. If I'm working on an issue and changes are coming in for some of the images, such as alterations, I can link to the main JPEG and however many times it updates it will always grab the latest one. that way I don't have to import, resize, apply border, effect, clipview each time I bring it in.
If you don't collaborate like that, I think Xara does well in many respects. I think you'll still need an image editor, such as Photoshop, Paintshop, GIMP or something else.
Xara creates decent PDF files, but you need to make sure that it's set up to export files that your printer can use (if using a print service provider)
the next thing would be visual table creation and not a workaround, actually being able to create a table, colorize cells and type into each cell. Typography in Xara would be much better improved having Character / Paragraph defaults. With an entire magazine, having to update each pages text because of a font style change is annoying. In Adobe InDesign, you can just change a paragraph style and it will update across the page instantly.
I'd like to have access to more glyphs in a character palette, which what somebody might have been referring to when they said "symbols" If they actually meant premade objects, you could do that by creating your own clipart and line elements, no big deal there. I suppose you could create your own clipart elements containing all glyphs too, but that's kind of an annoying workaround.
There are so many ways that Xara beats illustrator and InDesign depending on the task, but others unfortunately Xara gets beat because of automation or data.
If I could change Xara, I'd allow the linking of image as a default option, and change it on a per-image basis.
Definitely add tables and other typography stuff in its own panel / palette, including paragraph and character styles.
Allow custom color swatches at bottom of the window so you could keep only the colors you want until you add more. in the program folder, Xara has several folder of elements, maybe that's possible. I'm not sure.
And the final one would be to be able to create a working document that somebody else could open in Quark, InDesign, Publisher, Scribus, OpenOffice or whatever so you could share and pass things off. That may be the hardest one of all, but it can create PSDs right now, so I just don't know.
My experience of print output is that Xtreme a great time saver over every possible alternative in terms of design and preparation. However it's handling of CMYK is it's weak point for me, particularly bitmaps.
I haven't had much luck with the newsletter templates in the gallery either although that may be just me and my lack of experience with multiple page Xtreme documents. Exporting them to PDF-X doesn't seem to work out well for me.
Use frequently for small 4 to 6 page Newsletters. Find it easier to use than many of the other cheaper packages once you have figured out the messy tabs etc. Gary has done a few tutorials on the subject and are quite helpful at the Xone. Here are a few links that you can use: http://www.xaraxone.com/webxealot/workbook53/page_5.htm
http://www.xaraxone.com/webxealot/workbook54/page_4.htm
I would agree with the comment on CMYK it can be a bit of a guess if you are using a print shop. It has a a few things missing but I would point out that it is not a DTP programme its is a vector programme. The big feature of XPro is its ability to repel text around objects which it does visually well, that would Wrap in most other programmes. Importing Word docs has to be done through cutting and pasting from that programme and it does that job well but do find the way to remove space before and after paragraphs on the tool bar at the far right side of the Text Info part of the top menu area.