Re: Importing text into Xara Xtreme-Xtreme Pro
Your idea of a whole lot of text imported correctly from Word into a page layout program staying formatted, well, to say the least, a couple of paragraphs might. I am moderator here of CorelDRAW forum and have a few years experience behind me. CorelDRAW will hold a couple of paragraphs from Word, that's it, the rest become Gaelic font in short order.
I don't care what the Microsoft folks will sell you but there is a lot that Microsoft Word does which is screwy and isn't read well by just about everything else. This stems from years ago trying to simulate a typewriter with a computer and then people got used to it and each upgrade has just added more ammendments to the original.
CorelDRAW 12 can just grind to a screeching halt if you embed a Word page. This is resolved in X3 but you have other hangups like longs waits to print. But in 12, even trying to isolate a portion of an embedded page from
Word, in a PowerClip isn't very useful, slow, slow, Windows 3.1 slow. DRAW has many more layout features than Xara has for the moment. Since I am often called upon to do newsletters in two or three spot colors, I still use DRAW for that as you can use percentages of color and have spot color which works with transparency in DRAW with overprints to actually make more hues. If I want to use a fabulous illustration, Xara can do that par excellence. Or for one page layouts. Or full color newsletters, Xara works well.
The best way for people who must use Word is to use it to provid typed articles and let the layout and graphic artist format the text for them to match. I take note of the fonts, and strip off the formatting. Learned, I have. One of the big reasons why text in Word is a nightmare coming in with lots of formatting is that bullets are often unique to Word, they and Microsoft Publisher do not use standard symbols for bullets, and people who center justify with tabs and use their indent sliders for a numbered list and then let the list numbering complete the format. These are formatting no-no's in anyone's book but so long as it isn't a glaring error on the screen, they will continue to supply horrible text. I have at times pasted it in Notepad to strip off the terrible formatting even Word doesn't get rid of, as it can actually crash another program, namely DRAW, so I could bring it in as straight ASCII text. Some of this formatting can become invisible making insrutible errors in a file which will not flow correctly. individual pages which refuse to print and it is more headache than it is worth. No one tells Microsoft to make a decent program, no matter how awful Word is, they can depend upon sales because "everyone uses it".
There are other word processing programs which aren't built so absurdly such as Word Perfect, in which case the formatting does stay intact bringing it into CorelDRAW as Corel owns WordPerfect. There is also Open Office and some free ones which work better than Word also.
Best way with text is to furnish a printed page to show how the client wants the formatting but let the graphic artist strip that down to native text and apply it as needed in the document. Having documents that don't crash is a much better benefit than trying to adapt to poor programming by Word. Microsoft however did a good one with Excel, just need to start over with Word.
Xara isn't broken, please don't fix it!
Every day's a new day, "draw" on what you've learned.
Sally M. Bode
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Originally Posted by lefteris
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