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.

[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.

[john713]

Sorry, forgot to attach the file.

John Furr

[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

[Peter Clifton]

Just a small observation.

I deal with file formats from different packages all the time.

When moving between packages there is always some loss of detail, things not rendering quite correct.

Xara has one of the most advanced renderers on the market, until all other packages have the same rendering features as Xara as well as the ability to translate point for point parameters for each special effect, you are never going to be able to export native Xara features as vectors to another package and have them look/print correct.

The only way you are going to get what you see on a Xara screen, printed from or imported to another layout package is via high resolution bitmap files.

Xara X1 has better support for this safe work flow.

Even with in other packages it is sometimes better to prerender certain effects to bitmap prior to exporting or sending it off to be printed.

Get used to generating high resolution bitmaps, I don't believe there is any alternative.

Peter

[Charles Moir]

Good Illustrator (or CDR, Freehand, SVG etc) is not easy - we're chasing a moving target after all. What's more there will always be issues where we support features that other programs do not - graduated transparency being one of them. However I can say that general import / export improvements are the next main priority, and that includes a better way in which third parties can add new import / export filters without us having to update the program.

[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

[RAMWolff44]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Charles Moir:
However I can say that general import / export improvements are the next main priority, <span class="ev_code_RED">and that includes a better way in which third parties can add new import / export filters without us having to update the program</span>. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hi Charles,

This is some really great information. Really really great!! So is this a matter of sharing code or making it open source so others can create proper import/export filters in their own programs??

Another question or three http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif a quote from the "About Xara Group Ltd." section in the Xara X Help file: <span class="ev_code_PURPLE">.... to the first drawing software to provide real-time anti-aliasing and transparency control</span>.

So my questions are: Xara Group Ltd. invented anti alaising?? If so other programmers are implementing it into their programs but it just doesn't stand up to Xara Group Ltd.'s version, actually I think a really close second is Macromedia's Fireworks MX 2004, very nice there too. So did these programmers have a look at older Xara code in order to know how to create their own version and if so why didn't they just implement the Xara code completely?? Seems to me that CorelDraw and Canvas and others should have this down by now and yet they do not. Kinda strange to me!!

Thanks! 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.

[jens g.r. benthien]

ok guys, here we go with a rock solid solution:

install the Linotronic 630 printer driver, port = file. Now print your drawing with the Lino driver. Check all the options of the driver very carefully - that means in the PostScript section enable 'Encapsulated PostScript' and download soft fonts.

Now print your drawing to a file. Give it a name with the extent *.eps*.

Open and check your result with GhostScript. **Every bit of your drawing is in the file**!

Now try to open it with a new Adobe product. Chances are high that Adobe Illustrator will start caughing. The reason: the inventors of PostScript do **not** stick to their own standards...

So please don't blame Xara for this bug, call Adobe and kick them into their b..ts.

As Charles said: it's like chasing a moving target. Adobe is similar to Microsoft: they love to include non-standard features into their apps, but they don't tell you for obvious reasons.

As long as your exported (=printed) file will display flawlessly in GhostScript, the file adheres 100% to the PS standard and you should tell your customers to give the Adobe tech support a hard time.

As weird as it is, if you place an *.eps file you've created with the Lino printer driver in Pagemaker, it prints excellent. But Pagemaker is kind of outdated, meaning it doesn't feature these little extras of the new Adobe products, thus handling a correct eps the way it should be handled.