So why did you change to XaraXtreme?

[steve.ledger]

This question is squarely directed at professional* graphic designers/artists, illustrators, sign makers, publishers, printers or anyone who is currently in business or the industry where typically Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Freehand or other better known software is the accepted 'Industry Standard'. I'd like know what occured which brought about your change to Xara and why now choose to use it for most (if not all) of your output?

It's a fairly simple and straight forward question which I ask as I've been coming across resistance to Xara by a significant amount of people. Xara is simply dismissed because it is unknown and not an 'industry standard'.
Most have never even heard of Xara, although a couple have 'heard of' CorelXara and therefore (in their own minds) this somehow qualify's their use of CorelDraw because, well it's 'the same thing isn't it?' (!?!)

In conversations, I mention such things as 'intuitive & fliud ease of use' and that Xara software runs better on older hardware but this is shrugged off.
Serious doubt is expressed by my assertion that their own workflow speed as well as that of their staff's would increase, & their output would probably be better as staff would actually enjoy their work more. Training time for new staff would be reduced, allowing more employment opportunities for less skilled newcomers and of course the lower cost of purchasing Xara software with it's less restrictive licensing terms are pretty convincing factors that again are shrugged off.

I'd like to see an objective response to this, rather than an intellectual debate (which may stray off topic).

*By Professional, I mean those who derive all or some of their main income from their work output.

[michaelbuddy]

At some point in 2005 maybe I began seeing some ads or something like tutorials about Xara and I think it might have been with a current release then of Xtreme. I decided to try it..though I thought it might be one of those programs that feels kind of junky (serif page plus and scribus are like that, where the features sound great, but it feels somehow old or unstable somehow)

Anyway, I was impressed by a couple things. The feel was really smooth. The mousing, the canvas drawing felt right. Then reading further, the transparency slider tool and seeing it on images was really impressive. The marketing pages about the speed and the zoom to 35000% and the speed comparison to illustrator were all things that started to make it superior in my mind.

Granted I didn't buy it at that point, I dug into the trial. I began to feel my own workflow improvements. It was a lot more fun to work with Xara and design than adobe. I was noticing Adobes palette bulk more after getting used to Right-click drag copy, fills, rotate, the ease of path combinations (pathfinder stuff in adobe.) Xara is much better. Another example of that superiority in xara is using the pencil tool to cut away from an existing path shape by just drawing from one edge to another.

There were some learning curve problems. For example, I was a little bummed about not being able to gradiate the stroke of an object, or how the linear transparency didn't work on strokes. But then I learned the workarounds such as using the contour tool and grouping the single shape to give it a full transparency and that became a non issue fast.

There are a few things that kind of bug me still that aren't fixed. One example is the fact that a bitmap exported might have a white border if it's not an even size. 30.2 pixels might give you an erroneous white border, where 30pixels won't. I don't like how you can't do certain kinds of moulds on images, even though it would be so awesome. I don't like how the Y coordinate 0 is at the bottom left and not the top. I don't like that you can't link to images rather than just embed. Also, the embossing tool is a bit wierd. Somehow embossing can create a tiled bitmap emboss edge where you'd expect it to be vector no matter what you do. You may realize it happens to you if you really mess with emboss on objects.

But if you use xara for the things it's great at, you mostly will be really happy. If you assume that you will have conversion issues trying to export/import to EPS, swf or AI when you get into the other programs, then that expectation will make you more happy about xara.

Xara has an excellent opportunity. If Xara comes out on Mac, and hopefully fully for Linux, it will be a champion program. Over the next few years, other programs can't take away from Adobe user share for the pricing, the emergence of touchscreen apps is another way. There is a whole new market for touch screen apps where any leader can emerge once this multi-touch technology comes to the home via microsoft, perceptive pixel or whatever apple might come up with.

xara could become a standard just by creating the program on all platforms. Standards seem to be created by being able to reliably share with others. So there's no reason why xara couldn't be the standard in 3 years. It could employ app scripting, image linking, SVG, data link up with xml and maybe a couple other things, and people will be all over it.

Other than mesh gradients, and some live data linking, illustrator really doesn't do anything special. the live fill is kind of nice in illustrator, where you can paint fill areas where strokes overlap even if it's not a solid path area.

If corel brought back Mac support and Linux support with its apps, it could also overtake adobes share on a lot of stuff. Painter I think is the only corel app left on Mac. Certainly the X3 suite isn't for Mac.

[ss-kalm]

You can change the co-ordinates ........ From Xtremes help files:

[Albacore]

When I was teaching and running a department as principal teacher of Technical we were recommended to have CorelDraw for Craft & Design and Graphic Communication for our Higher pupils. This was at a time when I was running the department with 20 Acorns with ArtWorks & Publisher in the majority of our computers around 1995. At a large cost to the school we re-equipped 7 computers with PC’s, CorelDraw and Microsoft Office with Front Page for publishing. As I reg’d CD I got email offering C.Xara, sent away for trail copy and thought it was good. At around the same time also got letter offering me to upgrade from ArtWorks if I had PC’s for Xara which I took up with 1 copy and things looked better still. Got more money from the school for further PC’s and this time bought site licence for the school for £160 for 20 computers and with our pupils using the software suddenly our kids in Graphic Communication started to get really high marks.

This improvement in our pupils work got me the job at teaching teachers to teach graphic com. But I had to deliver it in CD rather than in Xara however with little supervision of how I did my work and the handouts given to teachers who asked how I did certain things I introduced them to Xara and many took it up. Also I was asked to do drawing in examination papers and exampler materials for changing courses and this is when I ran into problems using the software as it had to be printed in CMYK and the hoops that I had to jump through and the colours that I had to change so it was not all plain sailing.

Now I am employed doing graphics work in newspapers and work daft hours and I have to use AI with all its finger hopping around the keyboard to draw curved lines but it is a nice piece of software and in its newest version quite quick and very reliable. As I am aloud to take work home, and as I partly am employed to do work at my home, I still revert to Xara and use PDF as a export because I am so comfortable with the software. At the moment I keep quiet about using Xara at home although my work flow is one of the best in the office because AI is king and no other software is allowed.

I think I have touch on why Xara has not been accepted by the professionals as it is the way it handles colour for print. It can’t make up its mind whither it is RGB based or CMYK. You can’t have a programme which gives you RGB effects in a CMYK doc, without telling you, ie all the bit map effects. At least AI gives you the opportunity to raster problem areas and it also highlights the areas. Still now even with our recent upgrades we have problems importing text through PDF, everything must be a shape that doesn’t help me when I email drawings for review. When I worked 2 years back in my local print shop I tried to introduce Xara to them and they did start to use it on the small work but when they sent it to be printed they got call backs from the printer which did not happen when they used Illy. As I still go in there on a regular basis I get slagged off for using Xara and when I try to explain to them the work arounds to do certain things I get the answer that you don’t need to do that in Illy.

Since I use Illy at work and still do freelance, would I just use AI all the time, the answer is NO, I still do and want to use XPro. But the time it takes to do drawings, when you compare both programmes, is getting smaller than the time I took to do the same drawing 2 years ago

[MarkMyWords]

Well, I used to do all my inking by hand and then scan it in, and colour it in Photoshop, but when I began to see more and more vector work, I thought that gave a far superior line to what I could get by using a brush and pen.

I tried for a long time to do my linework in Photoshop, using the pen tool, that was good, but after trying out various vector programs;Illustrator, Serif, Realdraw, Expression, I could see the advantage of using vector for my linework, vector gives far cleaner line and it's resolution independent.

I came across Xtreme entirely by accident, everyone in the job was telling me to go with Illustrator, which I had used before in various studios, but I wasn't too keen on. Having spent a grat deal of time learning traditional skills, then moving those skills to digital tools, I was reluctant to start again, but when I tried out xtreme I was very pleasently surprised at how easy it was to get into.

Still for quite some time I only used it to draw linework and almost nothing else, it is only recently that I have moved into full colour work and that is going far better than I had thought it would.


BTW, I love your new avatar Albacore.

[BONES]

I first read about Xara 2.0 in Computer Arts magazine, where it was their champion structured art package during 1998 and 1999. The illustrations in the review looked impressive so I tried out the demo version and was hooked after about 5 minutes. At the time Corel was at v7 and Illustrator 8 had just been released. Xara was so much better it wasn't funny [Illustrator 8 on PC was a complete and utter joke]. Xara wasn't as full-featured but it made 90% of things I do so much easier that it left me plenty of time for the odd workaround.
Over the years it has taken more and more of the load from Photoshop/Photopaint as well. It is firmly entrenched at the top of my recent programs list on the Windoze start menu on all my computers [even my music PC].

[gnurf]

...because it's fast and intuitive! Today I do a lot of newspaper graphics and with the possibility to export as PDF/X I do the final checks in Adobe Illustrator or Acrobat Pro. Also, a lot of my other graphical work is made with X pro and the final touch is usually done in Photoshop. If I didn't have Adobe CS I would probably manage with X Pro, but it isn't really finally tuned yet (but close). I would say that 99% of my graphics are made with X Pro (except photo retouching for which I use Photoshop or Lightroom).

[wW]

I remember the add I saw for CorelXara, not long after, I was in CompUSA & noticed it there on the shelf - Less than 100 dollars (I think 40-60 bucks).
At the time we were using 386-486 PC's with Corel 4 & 5. We also used a autodesk program called Animator pro for bitmaps (pretty much for everything).

Once I started using Xara, Draw usage dwindled to a halt, so did Ani Pro. We had one CDR file, containing all the panels in a CH53 hilo. It took 45 min to open with Corel, re-draw's took about 30 min each, Man It was bad & unless you where in wire frame you couldn't do anything. I opened this file in Xara, Walla! 10 sec redraw or less, Incredible! Plus on screen anti-alias & transparency control - All without wire frame...!

Once the big wigs saw what was possible with Xara, they eventually switched to it exclusively for final output, took about a year. 3dstudio images would be imported for layout & exported for programmers. That was probably about 10-15 years ago, wow!

Magix & XARA LTD. Get this into schools & colleges! It'll catch like a California wildfire. (No disrespect intended, used for analogy only.)

[jclements]

Intuitivness is a huge reason for me using Xara. Makes it easy for me to get others collaborating with me on board as well. Also, in most cases, I can figure out a work-around on my own in a fairly short time because it easy to understand the "logic" of the program. (Note: I am now in the situation where I have to learn some other "professional" software. Learning and using that interfaces is a HUGE point of frustration for me -- honestly I don't know if its because I'm getting too old to learn or if its Xara's (Charles') fault for disabling me from using more "complex" software).

Speed and display and quality are next biggest reasons.

I use it mostly for images for print or web manuals, reports and proposals, and for PowerPoint presentations. Others uses, less frequent, are for posters and short multipage materials such as handouts and brochures.

[Josie]

The major points for me were (are):

1. Fast and convenient for creative work: I can quickly put my ideas into reality
2. Essential for experiments: fast response and the set of features enable me to quickly try and abandon tens or hundreds of design solutions. Related: "Previous Zoom" is just fantastic and I don't know any other software that has it.
3. Not to forget the best anti-aliasing. It's so good that the screen display looks almost equal to a printed copy. Priceless.

Overall, it looks like designed with the user in mind. Which is not the case elsewhere.