New User - disappointment

[Keir]

I have managed for many years, producing great vector images, simple technical drawings and illustrations using a very basic programme many of you will never have heard of, or forgotten existed: MS-Draw1.1.

It is a simple WMF editor, limited to the WMF format (text on a sinle line only, only simple radius curves, flat-fills, limited to 90 degree rotations, fixed size snap-grid etc.), but it is extremely quick and efficient to use as long as I work within its limitations. If I need more sophistication I use CorelDRAW8, but that takes longer and crashes more often.

MSDraw came as part of MS-Works, as an OLE applet, that you could call up from within MS-office. However it was only 16-bit, and I've not managed to get it to work with anything newer than Windows-98 and Office-97.

I have finally had to move to a faster, newer machine (Vista - Dual Core - Word 2007) and have been urgently looking for vector editor that could replace MSDraw (and Corel). I have been amazed at the paucity of vector editing software! Then I found Xara: Great! Or so I thought...In the three weeks I have been using Xara for I have been disappointed to find the following limitations:

1. Simple Xara images (e.g. circles and text) pasted into MS-Word are pixilated so do not scale properly as a vector should when stretched or enlarged. MSDraw and CorelDRAW both manage this from the clipboard!
The best vector export is WMF, but this introduces weird artifacts - useless!

2. If I select some objects from a drawing to copy and then paste them into Word they are usually so tightly cropped that bits of the shape are truncated (i.e. off the edge of the canvas) so diagonal corners are missing, and circles have a flat side.

3. When an inserted object is double clicked Xara opens it small in the top left of the screen. The zoom menu then behaves erratically, getting smaller when enlarged!?! Then when I close to update the word document the image has become very small for no particular reason. This is crazy - it makes Xara close to useless as a vector drawing programme for Word.

4. When drawing in Xara some snapped-to-grid items that should have the same alignment appear slightly misplaced at certain magnifications, but not others, and sometimes this misalignment only shows up when printed or pasted - Why? Snap-to-grid should be one of the most basic things to get right in drawing software (and yes, I do understand Xara's leading edge snapping/line edge/path snapping etc). For example if I draw a short horizontal line so that it lays on top of a longer horizontal line of the same thickness it should be invisible: sometimes it is, but if I nudge it horizontally I will find positions where it appears one screen pixel thicker than the line beneath it - i.e. it goes out of alignment! If this was simply a screen rendering issue this would be irritating enough, but it happens when printing - even on occasions when it was not visible on the screen. Sorry, but this appears to me to be very sloppy programming. The crappy drawing tools in MSWord do better than this!

5. If I start from MSWord and choose Xara document from the Insert Object menu then I have to set the page size manually after I have made my drawing - is there no crop-canvas-to-fit-drawing option? Maually going back and forth, trying different page sizes until the drawing fits is tedious.

6. As I reuse elements of drawings again and again (e.g. electrical circuit symbols, kitchen units) it would be nice if I could stash them in a gallery to simply drag onto the screen as I needed them. I'm sure lots of other people would use this kind of function. Has anyone found a way of achieving this?


Well that is a bit of a rant, and I'm hoping someone is going to show me at least a couple of ways I can improve my Xara experience, because I do like many of the 'fancy' features of Xara that fall between the basic functionallity of MSDraw and the over-complexity and instability of Corel, but there just seems to be too many basic weaknesses for my needs.

Any suggestions or comments?

[Mickie]

Keir,

#6 is fairly easy. Put your drawings in a folder. Open the clipart gallery and click on disc clipart. Browse to your folder and click add. When it asks if you want to create an index, click create ... this will create thumbnails of your graphics. Now they will be available through the gallery for drop/drag onto your workspace.

Mickie

[Soquili]

Hello Keir,

Your # 1.
I'm not sure why you see jaggies when pasting shapes copied from Xara into Word. I have never experienced that. I simply copy the shapes to the clipboard in Xara and paste into an open Word document.

Your #2.
What is your page size within Xara and within Word? I've never experience any clipping you describe. My Xara page size is US Letter. The same in Word.

Your #3.
When you double click an inserted object in Word it open Xara and inserts the objects in a new page set to match the bounding size you have set for the shapes within Word. This is on logical IMHO. The page size matching the size your word document has for the objects is a reminder that if you resize outside that area Word will clip the shapes. That is a limitation within Word and not Xara. I did not experience the change in size you mention.

Your #4.
Xara works on a sub pixel level. If you remember to make sure your objects are full pixel sizes and locations they work well in other applications like Word that do not render to sub pixel values.

Your #5.
You need to tell Xara what size your bounding area within Word should be so you do not get clipped objects.

Your #6.
Create a folder for you files with the objects you want to have available. Save the .xar file for those objects in that folder. In the ClipArt Gallery click the Disc Clipart button and then navigate to your folder. Your files will be in your ClipArt gallery for use. One thing to remember is the more clipart folders and files you have the slower Xara will launch.



I've attached an image of some shapes pasted into a Word document and a zip file containing the Word 2007 file.

I am a Xara user not a Xara employee. Talkgraphics is moderated by users of various applications discussed in the various forums. Xara employees do visit and post here on occasion.

[steve.ledger]

#1. Never had this when pasting shapes into Word. Always pin sharp and scalable vector data.

Even if the View Quality slider in XaraXtreme is set low, the pasted data is still pin sharp in Word (2003).
Can't think what might be the issue causing Keirs results
Your display is set at 32bit colour I assume?

#2 to #6 = As Bill says..

[David O'Neil]

...Even if the View Quality slider in XaraXtreme is set low, the pasted data is still pin sharp in Word (2003).

Not so here. Zoom in to 500%. I can't find any setting in Word (2003) to treat the final print result as anything other than a 96 dpi graphic. That is bad where professional printing is concerned.

[steve.ledger]

David, it was the clean Scaling of pasted vector data that I read as being the issue, not so much zooming in when viewing in Word?

Printing from Word at normal view (100%) gives excellent results on my Samsung Colour laser and Dell mono laser. Nothing at all like the zoom view shows, which, though I might be wrong, is probably 'Windows picture and fax viewer' code utilisation. But it would certainly print like your example if you printed the result of a screen grab

[David O'Neil]

I printed it to Adobe PDF using the highest quality setting, and looked at the generated PDF. The bitmaps were at 96 dpi. It would not be a good candidate for professional printing--the interaction between Word and Xara seems lacking.

[steve.ledger]

The bitmaps were at 96 dpi. It would not be a good candidate for professional printing--the interaction between Word and Xara seems lacking.

That's screen dpi, not print quality David. The print quality DPI is controlled by the printer. You can access this via the control panel or via Print Properties from the application you print from when you select which printer to output to.
Similarly this can be set from the 'Properties' 'Advanced' settings of your PDF print driver.
Remember to that print quality dpi cannot be 'seen' on screen. It's a printer output quality setting.

[David O'Neil]

Create a PDF and post it. I am using Adobe's high-quality settings--the problem is that Word itself only has a 96 dpi graphic within it, and it only puts that into the PDF--it doesn't call Xara's print driver to get a higher-quality graphic. I'm betting that if you do get a 300 dpi graphic, it will be aliased and not pin sharp.

[steve.ledger]

David, dpi does not change image size, so no anti-aliasing or interpolation is necessary. It's a print quality setting.
Dots Per Inch can changed but it's still an inch regardless of how many dots per inch the print process delivers.
See the screenshot I posted, the various dpi print quality settings are also depicted in the small icons besides each dpi setting. The higher the dpi, the more dots it shows on the icon. You cannot 'see' the effect of print quality dpi on a computer monitor.

The 96dpi setting you see in Adobe prefs, is display pixels per inch (DPI scaling in Windows display settings), which does not relate to print quality at all.

Professional printers of course have greater control over print quality output.
But as you have suggested, you cannot make a lousy picture better by upping the dpi output.

This may be a case of the old dpi v ppi confusion that is slowly being corrected, thankfully Adobe and Corel have already got this right.

I wasn't aware that Xara installed a print driver?