Adding bold to font in XXP4

[standay]

Yes is was a deliberate decision to remove this feature, or rather I should say to fix a serious problem.

Some may not like it. Many did not like the way it was before, and will prefer the new system. I believe it was the right decision.

Count me as one who does not like it to the point of cancelling my upgrade to v4 a few minutes ago. I have too many files to maintain with "synthesized" fonts in them and I don't want to add outlines, skew and all that stuff, either to the old files I have or to new files where I want to use one of my fonts that doesn't have bold/italic faces in it.

I've used and supported Xara from the corel days. This new "feature" has ended any further upgrades for me. I'm hoping you'll add the choice of using or not using synth fonts at some point.

[BQ]

Even a Xara template ended up with the warning.....

[sculptex]

I have to admit I am pretty gutted as I now have hundreds of broken files.

You experts obviously know what you are on about and I agree thats got to be the way to go for the future if its industry standard.

BUT, I have to say;

* I really dont recall ANY warning of this in previous versions.
* I would have loved to have had some grace on this and had the option to override to allow rendering non-standard files say until version 4.1. But I guess that code has been stripped out now never to return.
* This apparent lack in the software has been kept pretty quiet up to now. Can't even remember much complaints on these forums. Was it really such a huge issue with the majority that had to be abolished from existence?
* Manually thickening lines and slanting is a pretty awkward option. It definitely renders slightly differently (I have overlaid one version on top of another and cannot get an exact match) but the bigger problem is that it cannot be used with text in a paragraph or with other effects added such as bevels.
* I think that this was an excellent feature which Xara software should have been be proud of.
* I love everything else about this upgrade, please keep up the good work.

[MEB]

I understand the problem this may cause specially in cases of logos etc, but still think it´s the way to go.
It´s always possible to convert the text to outlines to keep the synthesized look you had (for logos or big headers). You can have both versions v3 and v4 runing at the same time to edit and copy the outlined text/logos or headers as you need.

If you have used the synthesized bold and italic fonts extensively in body text you may want to consider to select a similar substitute font. In the body text case this shouldn´t be too dificult, since no one would pick a scripted font or similar for large blocks of text.

Now that the synthesized code has been removed this problem will never appear in future versions because all text generated in Xara fully complies with the font specs (and type designer vision). Besides it will avoid problems when exported to some formats.

Meanwhile you can update the old files with substitute fonts and convert logos to editable shapes when they are needed. You don´t need to remake them all in one time. It certainly will give some work but it will pay in the end.

[cbutton69]

Steve J (Handrawn) sent me to this thread. Now that I've read all four pages, I understand and I now agree that Xara nade the right decision, and I'll gladly work around it.