Colour Separation In Xara-X is Unprofessional

[rotexy]

I just tried my hand on the recently released Xara-X and dicovered that it can not handle Pantone or spot colour separation very well using an imagesetter. When you tell xara-x to over print a spot colour it does not do so, rather all the effects e.g. drop shadow, emboss etc. came out all wrong! to over come this problem I had to result to recreating the document all over again in Coreldraw. I would like to know if there is a way around this problem. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_mad.gif[/img] null

[rotexy]

I just tried my hand on the recently released Xara-X and dicovered that it can not handle Pantone or spot colour separation very well using an imagesetter. When you tell xara-x to over print a spot colour it does not do so, rather all the effects e.g. drop shadow, emboss etc. came out all wrong! to over come this problem I had to result to recreating the document all over again in Coreldraw. I would like to know if there is a way around this problem. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_mad.gif[/img] null

[Mick Robinson]

Just checked and Xara X can handle overprinting spot colors when they are solid color. However some effects are created using bitmaps. (These effects include transparency, shadows and bevels.) Bitmaps go via RGB color space and get separated only to the CMYK plates, not to the spot color plate.

[rotexy]

Thank you Mike for your response, I have already ordered a full copy of Xara-X through a freind currently in England, I will register my Xara-x as soon as I get it.

Why can't Xara-X separate a spot colour that has a drop shadow? Please try and include a print preview utility with the next upgrade of Xara-X. I also noticed that Xara-X much touted screen redraw engine sufers a performance hit when you have a lot of effects applied to a document. My system has 256 MBRam 800-mhz pentium III with 15 gig-harddisk, and yet Xara-X runs slowly after applying fethering, dropshadow, Beveland Tranparency effects.

[jens g.r. benthien]

Rotexy,

seems you have a bottleneck somewhere in your system. It is of no importance at all what kind of CPU, RAM, motherboard, graphic card and hard drive you have - the exact match of all components is vital.

I am running XARA on a - hold your breath - 233 MHz Pentium One with 128 megs RAM, NT4, a 16 MB PCI graphics card and a SCSI subsystem. It serves as a CAD machine, working in the background as an Internet access server for all office machines, and XARA runs smooth and fast. Fine tune your system, make sure you RAM is paged correctly, eventually replace the graphic card and check the system for bottlenecks.

XARA X trial runs on my 300 MHz laptop with 128 megs RAM, a 2.5 meg graphic card @ 1024 x 768 24bit, Win2000 Pro, and it is fast like hell.

Tweak your set up to the max, and you will see how XARA starts to fly.

ciao,
jens g.r. benthien

[tad]

Hello !
"make sure you RAM is paged correctly"
Love to ! How do we do it ???
Tad