A serious accuracy problem

[James Loudon]

Here's a thing. I have been using Xara for a couple of years now and have always found it to be brilliant and accurate. Today I was designing a logo for our yellow pages ad that had to be exactly 6.00 x 6.40 cm. So I made a box that size, put all my stuff inside it. I then printed it off and it was actually 5.8 x 6.0.
Bizarre..exported as a TIF and opened and printed in Photoshop...and it's 6.00 x 6.40 as it should be. Its not the printer because I have outputted to an HP inkjet and a Samsung Laser and both do the same thing.
Any ideas? Here is my abreviated kit list:
Athlon 1300
512 ram
Matrox G550 DH
Windows XP Pro

Any thought gratefully received. Thanks.
James Loudon

[James Loudon]

Here's a thing. I have been using Xara for a couple of years now and have always found it to be brilliant and accurate. Today I was designing a logo for our yellow pages ad that had to be exactly 6.00 x 6.40 cm. So I made a box that size, put all my stuff inside it. I then printed it off and it was actually 5.8 x 6.0.
Bizarre..exported as a TIF and opened and printed in Photoshop...and it's 6.00 x 6.40 as it should be. Its not the printer because I have outputted to an HP inkjet and a Samsung Laser and both do the same thing.
Any ideas? Here is my abreviated kit list:
Athlon 1300
512 ram
Matrox G550 DH
Windows XP Pro

Any thought gratefully received. Thanks.
James Loudon

[Lothaekor]

Have you tried going under print options, and making sure that the radio button beside custom fit is checked, and you've set the size there? Then select your objects and print selected.

[James Loudon]

Lothaekor - thanks.
I truly am a bear of very little brain and I didn't think of that. Selected custom size and scale of 100% and voila. I have to say tho,I find the Xara printing thing very obscure. <rant> The point is why do we, the operators have to figure out how to configure the page? Surely calculations of this sort are exactly the kind of things computers are good at. Years ago I used a word pro program called Locoscript, and it came with 4 manuals, one of which was entirely devoted to setting up the printer to work with the program. I remember thinking even then, how come the software can't have a chat with the printer driver, ask it what margins it needs etc and just get on with it? That was expecting a bit too much from PCs at that time, but surely it must be possible now. I'm not asking for a stupid Microsoft style "wizard" just a bit more sense.</rant>

[Lothaekor]

While Xara's printing interface isn't all too intuitive, it gets the job done when you know how to work with it. Personally I don't really mind if a part of Xara I very rarely use is a bit clunky, as long as the extra time they put into the rest of the program shows through.

Xara still amazes me at what it can do, and how much faster it is at doing these things than similar programs like Illustrator or CorelDRAW. All in a 15MB package.

Good things do come in small packages, ne? ;=8)

[gwpriester]

I was exporting some EPS files from Xara and placing them in Adobe InDesign and noticed the actual dimensions were off a little bit as well.

What was disconcerting was I placed a rectangle to the exact size on top with no outline and no fill and used this to select the objects within. And there was nothing outside the border of the rectangle.

It was easy enough to correct in InDesign, but still and all...

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[James Loudon]

Gary, thats even more disturbing. Exporting should be 100% accurate. I understand how the printing thing was off whack. But still cannot understand why it has to be so. Most of the time when you go to print a page, you will notice a dialogue saying something like: fits on one page: 97% scale. This scale applies to all your objects on the page. Why would you ever not wanted your objects printed at anything other than 100%. What you want is the actual PAGE to be scaled to fit the printer but not the objects. Depending on how you look at this, some logic would suggest that in order to accomplish this you would have to tell the program what printer you are using before you start a new document. Which is no big deal as we normally only have one or two printers. THEN, if we wanted to print to a printer other than selected initially we go through the best fit/custom fit scenario. Does that make semse?

[gwpriester]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> What you want is the actual PAGE to be scaled to fit the printer but not the objects. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well yes, but in order to get the entire contents of the page printed if your page size is larger than the printer can print at one pass, then Xara scales the page and its contents to accomodate the printing size. I can't imagine how it could be different.

If you want to print part of the page, you can make a selection and choose to Print Selection or whatever it is called.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[James Loudon]

Thats right - I guessed I phrased it rather badly. No, it does all make sense eventially - it just handles printing differently from any other graphics program I have used and I was a bit frustrated. The key is as you say, to print the selected objects rather than the page. Then it doesn't matter whether the entire page can be printed on, because it is not going to be.
Sorted.