I don't want to conform please help!!!!

[john713]

Hello,

I am a Xara user and have been for about 3 or 4 years. I love Xara and only have used Xara for any graphic design.

I recently was hired by a national news publication for Legal Nurse Consultants as their Director of IT Development. I have had to do some graphic design for this company because they don't have a graphic design division as of yet. I am in the process of building that now.

Here is my problem. Every graphic design company that we deal with it seems uses Adobe Illustrator. When I say Xara, I might as well be speaking Greek to them. Now I have a client that we created a logo for, to her specs. It is attached below.

I exported it to Illustrator EPS. When you open it up in Illustrator the transparency on the grid is gone. Every thing else is good. The fonts and gradients work.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t really want to use anything other that Xara but I feel that I have to move to using what the industry is using.

My question is, does anybody else have this problem? If so, what do you do to get around it or is there a way that I can keep working with Xara and get the final product in a format that the industry can use?

Please help. I don’t want to conform.

[Christine Farrelly]

I know exactly how you feel as I had to purchase a copy of Illustrator recently to satisfy a customers demands.

I hope Charles reads this and does something urgently about the Illustrator export issue.

Christine

[john713]

Sorry, forgot to attach the file.

John Furr

[Klaus Nordby]

Charles: "The ability for us to be very smart about bitmap handling, by only embedding the original JPEG and not de-compressing the image in the native file, is a perfect example."

That is very smart indeed, and you are to be complimented for it!

But even smarter _still_ would have been to just _link_ to external bitmaps on disk, so by updating these with any bitmap editor outside of XX the XX art would also have been auto-updated - and the XAR file would have been _truly_ tiny, if it contained _no_ bitmaps but only links and vector operations.

I started asking Ollie at Xara for this feature back in 1995 - how time flies, and no results still!

Now, I ceratinly don't claim such linking to be a new invention of mine: in principle, this feature is something which page layout programs, PageMager and QuarkXPress, have had for, say, only fifteen years.

Maybe time enough for Xara and others to "steal" and implement it - or what?

[alexbozhenov]

Christine,

There are a lot of printers in Windows. Settings - Printers - Add printer - Choose Linotronic.

By the way, I use Scitex Brisque PS-printer. It's don't matter which printer you use http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[masque]

I too have the problem of people never having heard of Xara. I do have to use coreldraw for some people and for them I just do simple xara drawings that can be exported as cdr files and pretend. From coreldraw I can export as adobe which satisfies most of the people who demand adobe files.
As an alternative there are always Tiff's which are OK most of the time.
When I actualy demonstate Xara, some people are converted and accept xar files once they have the software, but they are few and far between unfortunately.
Still I can smuggly sit at my PC knowing I am one of the few that is in step and snear at all the rest.

derek

[Christine Farrelly]

Jens,

Perhaps you could tell us where we can get this Linotronic Printer driver?

Christine

[Klaus Nordby]

Charles, great to hear! On getting XX1, I immediately tried the AI export - and saw, to my disappointment, that it was still the old AI 7.0 format which XX uses.

[carygee]

I'm in way above my head here but what about tackling the problem from a different angle: namely creating an Illustrator and/or Photoshop plug-in that could IMPORT Xara files...

As I said, not usually my table... http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[sgiff]

I recently also started working for a company which uses the standard "industry accepted" apps and really Illustrator is the only one. Most people I have met don't use anything else not even Freehand. So what I do is just export everything from Xara to Illustrator and it then if there are graduated transparency or dropshadows whatever Illustrator has all of these features now although cumbersom and clutzy compared to Xara it really only takes a few extra minutes to make all the changes in the Illustrator file to make it look exactly like the Xara file. Once you know how to duplicate Xara effects in Illustrator it is very fast.

s.g.