Outside of exporting an occasional CMYK tiff, I don't think I've ever done a CMYK or sep job in Xara. That's partly because I leave the four-color work to our ad agency and partly because the Pantone palettes in X1 don't bear any resemblance to the ones I have in my DTP app, so they're useless to me.

When I need a Pantone color in a Xara graphic, I usually do one of two things:

- If the job will be printed in house on our color laser, I use an RGB color that I know will be acceptably close to the Pantone color in the output.

- If I need seps for a commercial printer, I export the image from Xara as CMX 6, convert it to a "graphic object" in Ventura (my DTP app), apply the Pantone color as needed, and make the seps. Naturally, if part of the image has to go as a bitmap, such as a shadow, I handle that separately (no puns intended) and try to avoid needing anything but black in that bit.