Playing with brush strokes

[tomh]

I've been experimenting with brush strokes in XaraX 1a using a pressure sensitive pen. This release is the best yet with lots of fixes to irritating little bugs. Congratulations to the Xara team on this one.
The lines in the attached drawing show three problems related to using a graphics tablet and pressure sensitive pen. I would be grateful for any feedback on solutions. In each case a line is drawn, starting with low pressure (thin, light line) and ending with high pressure (thick, heavy line). When text or a bevel is applied to the line it follows the shape of the thickest part of the line rather than following the taper. The third line shows the links of the chain to become correctly smaller with lower pressure. However, each element of the chain remains centred in the same location, causing the chain to "break". Is there anyway to make the scaling reflect position as well as size? The potential for 3-d effects by combining floor shadow and brush strokes (line 3) is a really nice feature of XaraX.

[tomh]

I've been experimenting with brush strokes in XaraX 1a using a pressure sensitive pen. This release is the best yet with lots of fixes to irritating little bugs. Congratulations to the Xara team on this one.
The lines in the attached drawing show three problems related to using a graphics tablet and pressure sensitive pen. I would be grateful for any feedback on solutions. In each case a line is drawn, starting with low pressure (thin, light line) and ending with high pressure (thick, heavy line). When text or a bevel is applied to the line it follows the shape of the thickest part of the line rather than following the taper. The third line shows the links of the chain to become correctly smaller with lower pressure. However, each element of the chain remains centred in the same location, causing the chain to "break". Is there anyway to make the scaling reflect position as well as size? The potential for 3-d effects by combining floor shadow and brush strokes (line 3) is a really nice feature of XaraX.

[diccon]

Currently the text tool cannot wrap itself around variable width lines, it acts as if the line is always its full width, this is something we are aware of.

Likewise the bevel treats brush strokes as if they are normal lines, because bevelling each individual brush object is very slow and rarely gives good results.
If you really want to do this then do Arrange/Convert Line to Shapes on the brush stroke and then bevel it, the results can be unpredictable, the same goes for contouring.
However if all you want is a bevel round a stroked path you can use one of the stroke shapes on a normal line, then bevel that and the bevel will do it.

Regarding spacing of the brush objects and pressure, we had a go at altering the spacing with pressure along with the scaling but it made a lot of the airbrush-type strokes look rubbish so we removed it. It may be added again as an option in the future.

I agree about the floor shadows, see the attachment.