Shape library?

[u-woman]

Hello everyone! Trying to make it short: I've been a "Xara watcher" for many years, but until recently, never bought it, as I was working with raster images mostly. Now I needed a program to submit vectors to stock sites - and there's just no way I can shell out the money for Illustrator. So far, so good, has been working very well.

My question, is there any way to store shapes in Xara? Many of the shapes I use over and over and currently I drag them into my workspace from other documents. A very inconvenient way of working. So I thought I'd ask here if there's any solution.

Ursula

[iamtheblues]

Hi Ursula, welcome to the forum. You can save your shapes as .xar files and put them in a folder (eg Xara Shapes). Open Xara go to the Clipart gallery and import your shapes by selecting Disc Clipart and navigating to your Xara Shapes folder in the dialogue box that opens.
Saludos,
Bob.

[u-woman]

Thank you so much, Bob.....for the welcome and for your help! I'm going to try that right now.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference Ursula.

[u-woman]

Thank you kindly, Gary!

[Richard S]

Could you put all the shapes in a single document and save as a template drawing along with other preferences.
You can always delete what you dont need for a specific job if so desired.
Not sure just how many shapes and how big the files?
Maybe you could 'theme' the shapes - collect them in several drawings under various themes, uses, types etc.
regards
Richard

[u-woman]

Thank you for your ideas! I'm doing lots of those vine/flourish/swirly things for example. Many different shapes I'm too lazy to draw over and over (and way too inefficient for stock work). Thank you for your 'themed shapes' idea, I'll definitely use that. Still, I hope there will be a more efficient way of storing things in Xara's future, as it's a very cumbersome way of working (for me at least). I can only drag the the complete contents of a file into the workspace, then have to select and delete everything I don't need. So, for the way I work even an 'Invert Selection' would be extremely helpful. Using it all the time in my other programs, I was rather crushed when it wasn't there in Xara (or at least I haven't found it yet).
Thank you again, Richard!

[handrawn]

I guess you could 'select all' [ctrl+a] then deselect what you need, leaving everything that needs to be deleted selected, so you can delete it in one go?

sort of inverted selection

[u-woman]

Yes, that's what I do now. I'm up to around 250 shapes, stored in 4 files currently. It takes a while to delete the unwanted shapes. Is okay, as I love Xara and avoid Illustrator like the plague (well, except for checking eps files in the I8 trial version).

[weldorman]

Hi Ursula. I think there may be a better way to use your shapes but you will have to create an .xar file for each shape. This will take a little time but I am sure will be much faster in the long run.
As Bob had stated "You can save your shapes as .xar files and put them in a folder (eg Xara Shapes).
Open Xara go to the Clipart gallery and import your shapes by selecting Disc Clipart and navigating to your Xara Shapes folder in the dialogue box that opens.
Saludos,
Bob."
To take this a little farther if you like, Create your Xara Shapes folder and within it, create more folders that contain your shapes by category. Place each .xar file in these folders according to category eg: vines / flourish / swirly things.
Start Xara, open the Clipart Gallery and click "Disc clipart". Navigate to the first folder you want to add to the Clipart Gallery and click "Add". A popup will appear asking "Are you sure you want to create a new index?" Click on "Create" and the thumbnails will be created in the
Clipart Gallery. Repeat the same process for each folder you want to add to the Clipart Gallery. As you add new files to these folders, use the same process except click the "Update" button instead of the "Add" button.

Mike