Features you most want in XaraX

[Sheff]

What this thread could use is if someone could create a poll with all the requested features so we could vote on which ones we want and the folks at Xara could see clearly what we all need.

Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com

[Klaus Nordby]

Most Urgent New Feature: an update to fix the known bugs!

But we're not even getting that, and the silence from Xara about XX seems deafening - I fear it'll be a long while before we get any good XX news. If ever.

K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara

[philhendry]

I've been thinking about things that annoy me in Xara X.

I don't like the way 'snap' works. I hate the way the outline of an object snaps to, say, the grid, rather than the object itself snapping to the grid- it makes it a PITA to line objects up by hand. The only reliable way to align things by hand, I've found is to remove all the otlines, line the objects up, and then add the outlines again.

I don't like Illustrator much, but that it one (of the few) thing(s) it gets right.

I still hate the unchangeable default settings- 0.5pt linewidth, black fill, etc. I'd like to be able to set those myself (as, I seem to remember, we could in CorelXara?).

I've also been thinking about nice things I'd like to see added.

One of the other good things about Illustrator (10) is the ability to edit PDFs. Given how often Distiller et al screw up, it's really nice to be able to open the PDF in Illustrator and fix the problem. It would be even nicer if I could do that in Xara.

Cheers,
Phil

Trust the computer industry to shorten 'Year 2000' to 'Y2K'. It was this sort of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.

[John Dye]

For the second summer in a row I taught teachers how to use Xara to creat information panels at Battleship Cove. The The Teachers all voted the single most annoying feature in Xara is the text defaulting to Times Roman each time you start up. Why can't the default text font and size be saved with the Drawing or as part of a prototype drawing? or for that matter line size, color etc.
My all time favorate new feature would be a spell checker (teachers are not good spellers and neither am I)
I know I am repeating my self. Any word on when and If some or all of these wishes might be answered.
John D

[Clements]

Color Names are one of the slickest, timesaving features in Xara.

However, when importing one Xara file into another, the way named colors are handled falls a bit short when both files use the same color names.

What I would like to see is an option similar to that used for Layers. The user would be given the 3 choices: 1. Rename all color names in the imported file which are the same as the color names in the parent file (this is the way it works currently in Xara X). 2. Colors of the imported file which have the same color names would adopt the color mapping of the parent file. or 3. Colors of the parent file which have the same color names would adopt the color mapping of the imported file.

Other, more complex options could be useful. For example, a dialog box which would show the duplicate color names in a tabular format and then allow the user to choose between the above options for each color name.

Something else to consider would the situation where colors names are different but their CMYK, HSV, or RGB values are the same. A means to identifying these during importing and being given choices similar to those described above could be very useful.

[dalel]

I would love an information/history gallery that would bring up the history of any object, and make it possible to backtrack through the steps of creating it. This would be sort of like Photoshop's History palette, but would apply to each object.

Just knowing the information would be helpful. Being able to undo the steps from the gallery would be a bonus, but not necessary.

This pallete would also make tutorials easy to follow. You would simply need to look at the .xar file and check out how each object is constructed.

For example:

1 - New rectangle - rectangle 1
2 - Combine shapes - Add shapes with rectangle 2
3 - Feather
4 - Color change
5 - Bevel
6 - Shadow

http://talkgraphics.infopop.net/1/Op...&ul=1101906325
Why, I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself, you know...
- Lewis Carroll