Serif DrawPlus X5

Hi all,
I just received a pre-sale offer for the brand new release.
As I told last year - after purchasing X4 - I won't be buying it without first trial, so... anyone tried it by chance? How did you find it?
Cheers!

Hello Giovanni.

Look at the Serif forum for X5, there are a couple threads on first looks.

Yes, I have tried it. What would you like to know that those threads don't talk about?

Take care, Mike

Thanks for your answer Mike.
Yes I had a look over at Serif forums and found some interesting thoughts; what I'm interested most are speed improvements and "pixel-perfect" alignment of the drawings.
The previous X4 release disappointed me on these two aspects.

"Pixel Perfect" in any vector application is largely dependent on how the page, grids etc are set up--and how well one can snap-to those layout elements. And then there is the fact that one can get an anti-aliased edge, which maybe or may not be desired. So my work-flow for anything that matters, even when beginning in Xara products, I will always take my export into an image editing application. I tend to export always as PDF and then take that into PhotoLine (my main image editing application). From there, I may crop to a perfect size, alter text elements (text is text via the PDF), move elements, etc. Then export the image.

The speed is improved from the things I tried. Memory usage is perhaps slightly better.

Take care, Mike

Again, thanks for your answer.
I used PhotoLine back a couple of years and found it a very interesting piece of software. Extremely tight and fast, while a bit out of standards in terms of UI.

I completely agree with you on the "pixel perfect" graphics matter, it looks to me that this is kind of a basic feature that many vector applications just don't take into account (or at least not enough), and this is weird because these apps are often used to produce web contents.

Can I ask you two very specific questions on Serif DrawPlus X5?
1) when you set a stroke on a path, are you able to specify if the stroke should be put inside, in the middle or outside?
2) when you set a rounded corner on a path, what unit of measure can you use to set the roundness? Is it percentage, pixels, or others?

Thanks a lot for this interesting discussion.
Cheers!

Hey guys! I read the rules, and tried to make a few informative posts. I probably should not be bumping such an old topic anyway. Im giving away a copy of this software on my website. If anyone wants to have a look.

[edit: link removed]

you are right - you should not

Sorry about that.

im still at school and i was thinking about using it there :P