Export from XPGD 6, Import to Flash CS4, Problems With Every Format

Here's what I'm trying to do:

1. Create graphics with Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 and export
2. Import into Flash CS4 Professional to be edited and animated

I have tried exporting from Xara as SWF, AI, and EMF. Flash can import all of these formats, but there is something wrong with every one of them. For testing I used the file Plan.xar from Example Xara drawings 2 in the Designs gallery.

SWF: Many objects import with the fill or stroke changed to white. Some objects come in with the wrong strokes altogether. For example, instead of a 1pt tan stroke, some elements of the pergola come in with 28.8pt white strokes. Other objects lost their strokes entirely, such as in the compass rose. Arrowheads don't work but that's very minor. Text paragraphs break down to one item per line, but that's minor as well.

EMF: Many shapes were converted to bitmaps. Some shapes are just missing. Some lines of text are in three parts.

AI: Almost perfect. Even the arrowheads work. The big issue here is that overlapping objects with flat transparency (the trees) all became clipping paths with bitmap contents. Completely unnecessary! Just to be sure the problem wasn't unique to Plan.xar, I made a simple drawing with overlapping transparent circles and the same thing happened.

What is the best way to get static Xara content into Flash? I cannot do the animation directly in Xara because Xara's animation capability is extremely limited. I need to add advanced animation, audio, controls, and scripting inside Flash Professional.

Thanks.

will flash import pdf?

if so you can try that

assuming here your drawinigs are all pure vector...

different programs tend to handle things like transparency differently - there is no guarantee that you can port across 100% no matter what file format you use for the purpose - you need to establish what does and does not work in each case...

Flash doesn't import PDF. All of my elements are vector.

I may have figured out why the SWF import brings in a lot of white objects. Xara seems to be exporting white objects and then tinting them at runtime. But on import something is lost. A solid-colored object will import to Flash as white. A linear-gradient object will come into Flash as a movieclip with an advanced color effect. This fixes the fill but not the outline.

Still no closer to a working solution. I really don't want to have to use Illustrator.

What do you expect from a programme made by a different company! Flash does things to Illustrator even with Smart Objects. In that drawing you have circular fills and transparencies all don't export into Flash. Flash treats outlines as vector shapes and that is why you are having problems. I would try cutting & pasting you will get far better results so long as it is plain vectors.

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Originally Posted by Albacore

What do you expect from a programme made by a different company! Flash does things to Illustrator even with Smart Objects. In that drawing you have circular fills and transparencies all don't export into Flash. Flash treats outlines as vector shapes and that is why you are having problems. I would try cutting & pasting you will get far better results so long as it is plain vectors.

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I only expect it to work as well as it did a few years ago. Xara X worked better for me. I expect that Xara wants their software to work with other programs. If they didn't, they wouldn't have so many export/import options. Copy and paste does not work, even for simple objects with flat fills. Nothing pastes. I know very well that Flash and Xara both work with Vector shapes, and I know the stated limitations (complex fills, complex pen shapes, etc). That drawing (Plan.xar) has very little that should cause trouble.

Years ago we used to export from Xara X to SWF, and import the SWF into Flash, and everything was great. Apparently Xara has changed their SWF output so that it's no longer appropriate for graphics transfer. It may be better for final output, but it's worse as an intermediary.

So I'm asking the community for help. Surely I'm not the only one who wants to draw with Xara and animate with Flash. What works best for everyone else?

One roundabout solution is to:

1) Export the file as a pdf
2) Open the file in Illustrator CS4, release the clipping path and ungroup to taste.

At this point you can either save the file as .ai to import to flash, or copy and paste from within Illustrator.

I haven't rigorously tested this... but is seems to work.

Tovokas

Hi ToddS,

Your quite correct, something got broke in XX5 and lines and shapes mysteriously turned white and/or very thick.

Here's and example of that drawing exported from XX4 via swf into Flash

And the same but from XWD6. White lines & missing shapes and ugly black blobs.

Arrow heads have never imported. You'll need to change these lines to editable shapes to get them to import with their arrow heads.

In fairness though the swf is fine as exported from Xara, it's just the importing into Flash that's now messed up.

There are many nice features in the newest Xara that I'd love to use, but it would be better for my workflow to use the older version since it exports to Flash more cleanly. Is it available?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&k...l_4lfocwggby_b

Actually I meant "will Xara sell it to me?" I need to buy enough seats for a whole department. That's going to be hard to find by going the eBay/Amazon route.

Todd you will need to contact Xara Sales for information about purchasing any version. Members here at TG are not representative of Xara.

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Members here at TG are not representative of Xara.

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With the exception of; bb2, PeterS, covoxer, Neil, PhilM, LukeHart, GerryI, Kate Moir, Charles Moir and possibly AntonyF

However I still echo Bill's advice, best to contact Xara directly for purchasing queries.
Use the forum HERE and select 'Sales'

Don't know about that ToddS, you'll need to ask Xara. What you must remember is swf is Flashes animation export file type for browser display etc. It's not Flashes native authoring file type which is .fla. For example you can't import a Flash generated swf into Flash and guarantee the results will be exactly those of the .fla authoring environment.

You forgot a few Steve, but I'm sure it was just an oversight since you may not have had your morning coffee yet. ;)

I'm just about the remedy the coffee situation, I couldn't remember Martin's member name or the MAGIX staff members for that matter :D

Has this been posted to 'Dear Xara' yet?

Thanks everyone. I submitted a ticket so I'll wait for a reply on that before I contact sales. I'm still hopeful someone has a better way to export/import that doesn't involve Illustrator or fixing things after import. I do realize that SWF is an output format and not a source format, but the Xara X swf exports worked perfectly as a Flash import. Flash can import simple SWFs back into the authoring environment.

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Originally Posted by Karateed

Has this been posted to 'Dear Xara' yet?

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Is that the wish-list forum? If I don't hear an encouraging reply from my ticket, I'll certainly post this over there. I think what Xara really needs to do is offer a SWF export option that is specifically for importing into Flash. They can just drop in their old SWF export code from Xara X. I'm oversimplifying of course, but that's the gist of it.

I'm an animator and I use XPGD a lot for creating .swf assets(non -animating). I can't say I have encountered the problems that you have. The one big thing to note is that if you have profiled lines in Xara it is best to change them to editable shapes.

The only suggestion I have, based on my experience with Adobe and Flash updates, is that it may well be Flash that is the problem. I have Flash CS3 and it seems to work fine. Maybe it is CS4 that is the problem?
If you want to post a bit of a demo xar file I can see if I can export and open it in CS3 if you don't have it?

You need to understand and work with the limitations of Flash. Xara can produce many "live" effects that are not supported by Flash. Most transparencies and transparency shapes are not supported. Stroke shapes are not supported, etc. This is not Xara's fault or Flash's fault. They are two very different applications that can communicate for the most part on a very basic level.

People who have learned to work within the constraints of both programs have produced some really excellent results. Egg and Squeaky are just two members of the community who have produced excellent work with Xara's SWF file format.

Thanks Gary. I find export to Flash not to be a one button click process. For me it goes something like this:
Split my illustration into the layers I want in Flash in Xara.
House keeping on each layer. -Converting profiled line to shape and replacing any fill shapes that these lines had (that I forgot about :-)), Converting to editable shapes (to be on the safe side).
I often either create a copy of my work doc for this or duplicate the current page.

One simple tip I have is to 'select all' and then select the 'constant' (ordinary) line profile. If you draw shapes without lines after using a shaped line profile Xara applies that profile to the shape even though there seems to be no line which can cause problems with swf export.

Rarely I also get Flash being huffy with gradients and it takes a couple of attempts with the same file to get it to load correctly. If this doesn't work one old trick I used for this was to make sure the gradient start and end positions are on the edge of your shape. I am the worlds worst for having my gradients end points way outside the document even once I start tweaking things.

Hope this helps

I understand the limitations of both Flash and Xara. That's not the issue. I'm not trying to do anything fancy. I've attached a very very simple Xara file with three circles: one solid yellow, one with a red gradient, and a blue one with 50% flat transparency. All three have an 8pt black constant outline. Export to SWF. Import into Flash. With my prior setup (Xara Xtreme and Flash 8) this worked perfectly. What's happening today (with XPGD6 and Flash CS4) is that only the red circle comes in as a plain shape with the proper color and outline. The other two are converted to instances of the same pure-white library symbol (a graphic), with advanced color effects applied, and the outlines just go away. The advanced color effect reproduces the proper colors at runtime it's no good for animating. Converting to editable shapes doesn't help. Does anybody know why this is happening? Is it Xara? Is it Flash? Is it me? Please help. You guys seem to not have this problem. Has anybody else ever seen this happen? Thanks, everyone.

You are not going mad.
There is something very wrong there. I even had problems when I recreated the 3 circles from scratch.
The only way I could get them into Flash properly was to do them individually and they worked fine. As 3 objects on the page or a group I got the errors you experience. Even converted to editable shapes I got the errors. (as did using squares)
If - however - I drew some freehand shapes with the same fill attributes they exported to flash perfectly....well, apart from being no use at all as circles (or squares). I guess I haven't run into this because nearly all my content for Flash is hand drawn. It looks like a world of pain when I do need that functionality.

I'd say this was a bug and that you should report this to tech support. I'll cheer from the side lines and join in if I can. :-(

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Originally Posted by Squeaky

You are not going mad.

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Thanks for that, Squeaky! I needed to hear it! :)

I've been there mate. Group testing always helps :-)

I opened ticket number BVK-794761 with Xara on 8/25. No response yet.

I'm suspecting the 'fault' is actually pretty useful to the way Xara does animation with quick shapes. Shame it is so disastrous for the basic swf export.
Let's hope it is something they can fix with a patch. I suppose the only other work around is to use older versions of xtreme as i think it is impossible to draw circles point by point.

Yes well. I've just run into this again. I exported some type with a radial fill to Flash. I needed to break it apart in order to animate the transparency. When I did the letters became white. A bit of a problem that!
I have reported it to Support :-(

Customer service did some tests, they sent a file to me, I made some revisions, they did some more tests, and they've formally filed a bug report. Hopefully a future update will give us a solution. Perhaps the option to "export for import" since I'm fairly sure this bug is the result of a super-optimization that they surely won't want to undo.

Drat. It doesn't look like it is something easily solved.
I've been experimenting with Toonboom Animate. Their freehand vector tools are brilliant though the rest is an acquired taste and a step down from Xara. I'll try using that for the non exporting/editable work.