My thoughts on X1

[raynerj]

I could not have said it better myself Emanuel. My sentiments exactly.

[roman]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Charles Moir:
We anti-alias bitmaps when they are scaled and in some unusual circumstances it's useful not to smooth bitmaps even when everything else is anti-aliased, which is why the option is there. Fireworks has the same option on import, except it's irreversible and once a bitmap is scaled down it can't be scaled back again.


Technically our anti-aliasing is as good if not better than other programs we've compared against, and that includes Fireworks and Photoshop. A professional icon designer I know, who is a very recent convert to Xara X, and spends his working life creating icons of 30 pixels or less, was recently praising Xara X, saying that he was now using this for 50% or more of his new icons design 'because it was so pixel friendly'. So I suspect it comes down to personal taste.

As a little test, I decided to draw a small 20 pixel circle with a 1 pixel line width in both Fireworks and Xara X - a good test for any anti-aliasing. See below. They look pretty similar to me. There are differences and I guess in the end it's a subjective view as to which you prefer. Keep in mind that Xara X can position objects to a much higher resolution than whole pixels that Fireworks works in, and so you can tweak the anti-aliasing by moving objects fractions of a pixel.

The one on the right is Xara X. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I 100% agree with you. I don't and probably also other designers don't ask for different antialiasing options. Alhough as I've mentioned before, I've noticed that text on XaraX1 splash screens was made "whiter" by duplicating the text and make the upper text it semi transparent. I would solve such things the same way, so I don't necessarily ask for such things like optional strength of antialias, but there is need for pixel-exact font rendering when text is not antialiased. Some designs simply use pixel Exact fonts and only options how to do them in Xara is to use other application (bitmap editor, or screen-copy the notepad).

roman