Symbols in Xtreme (leftover experimental feature)

I just made a pretty exciting discovery, out of pure curiosity hacking in the Xara registry:

http://pub.instinctive.de/symbol.png

Note the "1 symbol on layer" in the status line, and "Double click to open symbol" :D

While the implementation of this seems unfinished, as editing the original in any way doesn't update the symbols, it is a revelation because it seems like symbols (aka true "clones") have already been in development before Xtreme 4, and we can expect them for 5 (?).

To enable:

- Find the registry key "CloneMakesSymbol" in the Xara registry folder, and set its value to 1
- Use the usual "Clone object" function in Xara on an object - tadaa, you got a symbol (which unfortunately doesn't update as I said, and is otherwise totally uneditable (which would indeed be correct))

Just wanted to share this...

Hate to disappoint, but this was an experiment, and that code was not meant to have been left in. The conclusion of those experiments (of which this is a remnant) is that this is not the way we're going to do live clones. It's not at all reliable and is very unlikely to find its way into Xtreme 5. Using this feature WILL generate documents that are not compatible with future versions.

Thanks for the explanation. I was not going to use this feature in any production projects of course. However, I found its discovery interesting enough for a post :)

You said that it is "not at all reliable" - does this mean that there actually is a way to get it to work (just out of curiosity)?

Thanks :)

Good find Alexander! Symbols are on a lot of members wishlist ..... we'll just have to keep our figers crossed.