The NEW Xara X1 Feature Request List!!

**colin_e** · 10 July 2004, 04:13 PM

My 2-penny'th. I'd go with Risto's no. 2- Customisable stroke shapes, and add:

1) Multiple pages in a single file. This could be simply storing multiple semi-independent one page docs (with independent page sizes etc.) in a single file, i.e. rather like directly saving/loading to a zip archive. True multi-page (with landscape/portrait control per page) would be nice though.

2a) True stroke shapes for object outlines (like the outline pen attributes in CorelDraw). Could be achieved with:

2b) A "seamless" option for custom brushes that offers proper seamless rendering of the brushed line, whereas currently the user only has the option of setting a tiny brush step and hoping the line comes out smooth, which often fails on sharp line corners and is brutally inefficient.

3) Dare I say fully customisable natural media stroke support a la Expression? personally I don't have the talent to use these, but I bet the true artists out there could achieve remarkable things with this capability added to Xara's current toolset.

4) Strive wherever possible to make the tools more "orthogonal". What I mean by this is-

a) All options work everywhere they possibly can.

b) Similar tools work the same, with the same range of controls.

Examples would be:

1) Why can't I add a bevel to a contoured shape, and vice-versa? If added on the same "side" (e.g. an external bevel on an external contour) the bevel would simply treat the last countour step shape as it's starting shape. If on the opposite side (internal added to external) the two effects would work independently.

2) As already mentioned, give the transparency tool ALL the same control options as the fill tool, inc. custom transparency stations.

5) A "power" option for the std. toolbar layouts, designed for large screens with a lot more of the tools on offer by default.

6) More intelligent toolbar layout control. At the moment if toolbars at the top of the screen are placed anywhere other than stacked from the left, they are treated as in a fixed position.
This means a toolbar at (say) the right of the Xara window will be clipped off if the main window size is reduced, rather than the toolbar being moved inwards to keep all the tools visible.

7) The ability to easily save/export/import toolbar layouts. This would make setting up multiple users, and maintaining a setup across upgrades much easier.

8) An option to control grid symbol size and colour. The current blue is pretty intrusive.

**Grafix Smelter** · 13 July 2004, 03:14 AM

In response to Charles' request for suggestions, may I ask for the ability to blink/flash selected items.
It is not always possible to work out what is selected in a busy drawing, and a feature I got the people who I beta test their PCB CAD package to add, is to be able to have selected items blink, then you can add or subtract objects and easily see what are selected before doing the next action.
Here is the button I use.

**Fluppet** · 15 September 2004, 10:50 AM

Hi. I'm new to this forum (although a pretty long-term, if casual, user of Xara software), so please excuse me if these have cropped up before, and accept my apologies for anything Xara (especially X1) can already do! I also gather I've come to this thread a bit late...

Some more requests to add to the list, some of which I know are quite a bit of work (and involve tinkering with the highly-tuned rendering engine), and one or two of which I've requested directly in the past:

1) A niggle ever since the Acorn Artworks/Draw days: in Draw, if you select multiple objects and then scale or rotate one, they all scale/rotate about their own centres. To get the same effect as Xara, you group them and then do it. I believe (although, in spite of just having placed an order, my machine is currently too ill to check whether my memory is accurate) there is no convenient way to reproduce the same effect in Xara. It was handy, for example, to have copied a load of objects in a grid, and *then* realize that you want them rotated through 30 degrees and a bit wider. If there's a Xara workaround, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, getting the same behaviour (by a modifier key or toggle button, so as not to break the current workflow) would be handy, and (probably) not hard to add.

2) Expose the undo list. Since we can now name objects, it's easier to show "rotate teapot 10 degrees" on the list, for example, rather than having to use internal object names everywhere. Having done this, allow the deletion of a step part way down the list (say you wish you hadn't changed the colour of part of your image, but you want to keep everything you've done since) - this deletion is, of course, another undoable step. Ideally, along with the suggestions for pasting of properties which people have mentioned, allow groups of actions to be applied to a *different* object. 3DS Max allows something like this. It's probably not that hard to program, although ironing out the niggles might be.

3) While we're at it... scripting, ideally with some parameters. This can get hairy, but it would be a big time saver.

4) Some uneven gradients for better lighting effects (proper lambertian spherical lighting, specular highlights with a parameterizable underlying curve, etc.) I may be asking a lot, but it would stop every five minute sphere demo looking wrong. To do badly, probably easy; to do well...

5) Fill shaders. Not a small job, but a scripting language (a la HLSL, Cg, RenderMan...) would make it even easier to tweak effects whilst remaining resolution-independent. Obviously there's a performance overhead, but sometimes it'd be worth it. (This would alleviate the need for things like the halftone effect requested earlier - obscure things like this can be coded retrospectively.)

6) HDR rendering (16-bit per channel for PNG and TIFF output/Photoshop compatibility, A2R10G10B10 support at least in full screen mode, 16 or 32-bit floating point support for image output). It obviously requires another renderer re-write, but the benefits for colour matching and high dynamic range image generation would be substantial - although expanding the colour gamut without making the default range hard to access might need thought.

7) ClearType-like rendering for TFTs. Because even Xara's antialiasing can be improved upon, and some of us have cheap LCDs (I use CORELXara - because I've not got around to upgrading it - on a 640x480 laptop, as well as my desktop box).

8) Coloured transparency (red differently opaque to green, etc.) Supported by RenderMan's model, but not by the DirectX model. An obscure effect, but handy when you need it.

9) Here's a big one: I know a lot of the Xara performance comes from doing the rendering on the CPU (because GDI rendering has painful overheads, apart from anything else). Since people are now working on image processing using PS 3.0, how about porting the renderer so the hard work is done (in stages, obviously) on the GPU, via custom shaders? I have an ulterior motive: I have an IBM T221 monitor on order, and no matter how fast you render it, blitting a 3840x2400 screen takes some time. There would be a lot of tuning to make it work at a good speed, obviously. If people start bulk-buying 30" Apple monitors and when Windows catches up with a scalable GUI, I'm not going to be alone, and modern graphics cards have a lot of horsepower available.

10) As I think someone suggested, some tuning of the antialiasing, at least for final output. Better sampling could be done at non-interactive rates, for example (especially useful with HDR images, where a single pixel can have a big effect when downsampled). Even without the HDR stuff, being able to play with gamma (especially for the difference between a CRT and a TFT) would be nice.

There's a few to be getting on with; there are probably others which I need to think about. Any thoughts, or am I being too picky?

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Fluppet

**MEB** · 15 September 2004, 12:19 PM

**xander11** · 16 September 2004, 04:39 AM

... and ONION SKIN View in a frame gallery please!

**Fluppet** · 16 September 2004, 05:40 AM

Miguel: Sorry, I'll translate (besides, I may not have said what I think I said!)

A2R10G10B10: DirectX 9 has support for 10-bit colour per channel - 1024 shades of grey, or a total of 1073741824 different colours. The eye obviously can't see even the "normal" 16 million you normally get, but some are far enough apart to show banding if the gradient is low enough (white and near-white grey, for example) and the effect can be more pronounced if you're using colour correction (gamma curves, etc.) The extra shades help smooth out the differences. I'm not sure whether Xara dithers at >24bit accuracy, but actually supporting the higher colour mode would allow better colour correction support and avoid any potential moire effects.

Floating point output is the same, but more so (although displaying it may be harder); the idea being that you can represent more colours, and also the range of the colours supported is higher. Microsoft has some DirectX demos which use this to handle reflection maps, light maps, etc. Depending on what you're doing, it's a nice facility to have - I don't know how many people use Xara-modified artwork for this kind of thing, though. It also comes in handy when you're trying to and lens effects (bloom, internal reflections, etc.) to an image.

You get this kind of thing, to a lesser extent, if you use a RAW image from a digital camera: normally there's a couple of stops of exposure which you can adjust while still getting a sensible (8-bit per channel) image, and that's because the captured data has spare bits at both ends. Xara's transparency would make this kind of effect particularly useful - "white" may go dull grey behind a semitransparent window (for example, if you wanted to simulate a grad filter, which Xara does very well), but a "light bulb" would still appear brighter.

As for the "fill shaders"... whenever Xara draws a pixel on the screen, it has to do some calculations (how the colour varies across the object, how to blend with the underlying colour, texture lookup, fractal calculations, etc.)

I'm not suggesting playing with the geometry, because that's potentially much trickier and disruptive to the way Xara renders (defining your own shapes - different kinds of curves, level of detail support, that kind of thing, nice though it would be...), but it would be possible with only a moderately large amount of work to allow the user to specify a program to be run for that pixel, in the way that DirectX allows users to run pixel shaders on graphics hardware (and preferably in a reasonably high-level language). Obviously this is going to slow things down in comparison with the highly-tuned code which is used for the objects Xara usually draws, but some effects are easier to describe algorithmically (for someone with the right mindset) than to do by hand.

The request for a resolution-independent halftoning effect would be easy(ish) to implement this way, as would a gradient mesh (although the interface might leave something to be desired). Think of it as applying PhotoShop plug-ins as an object is drawn, rather than applying them to a bitmap - although it's probably necessary to constrain the functionality somewhat (not allowing access to the pixels surrounding the rendered one, for example - otherwise there's a whole before/after buffer thing which would slow things down even more). It would mean that some effects could be provided retrospectively, rather than waiting for Xara to get around to a new release (or for a plug-in writer to do it).

I'm not expecting this to export to other vector formats, although PostScript would probably cope if you clubbed it hard enough. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

But yes, I too would like a gradient mesh tool.

Xander11: Okay, my turn... Onion Skin view?

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Fluppet

**Fluppet** · 16 September 2004, 10:27 AM

I knew I'd think of something else. A corollary to a request which someone else made for "printer colours" to be enable-able by default, and for Pantone colours:

What we would presumably really like is for Xara to handle colour calibration fully (although since this is kind of out of my field, I don't know whether this is normally the printer driver's problem, other than an attempt to keep the gamut within range). Whatever, "printer colours" seems a bit generic given the current state of the art.

By the way - since it's not easy for me to check at the moment and I can't remember - in 24-bit mode, does Xara dither its gradients (to more than 8-bit accuracy)? If it doesn't, could it be made to do so (and could the matrix be parameterized for size/levels trade-off)? If it does, can it be (optionally) turned off for circumstances where something else may have interference problems? (It'd be nice if this was controllable under the "shader" suggestion I made above, too.) This partly comes under the high colour depth handling I mentioned before, but arguably it could be a separate issue.

Let me know if I'm talking nonsense; it wouldn't be the first time...

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Fluppet

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