Why was the Xara X Linux forum closed?

[RAMWolff44]

Hi Richard,

unfortunately there are no developers working on Xara Xtreme LX since two years. Therefore it's appropriate to call this project "dead". I don't think that you will see progress with open points. I would say that Inkscape is the future (under Linux).

Remi

That's really too bad. I'm in Ubuntu right now, it's quite nice these days. Runs every bit as good a Vista (probably better in many ways). Inkscape huh... last time I used that it was so sluggish and not very familiar to me that I gave up after creating a few simple shapes. HATED IT!!

I thought there was going to be a project where Inkscape and XaraX were going to be combined (best of both or something) Any info on that if there is any to be found??

Thanks much!

[remi]

I thought there was going to be a project where Inkscape and XaraX were going to be combined (best of both or something) Any info on that if there is any to be found??

I'm not sure, how much cooperation between Xara and the Inkscape developers was planned:
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Charles Moir wrote on Monday, April 09, 2007 10:51 PM:
Right now with no active development of the Xara LX open source base going on, I think talk about cooperation or merging Inkscape / Xara is premature. The lack of active open source development is partly because Xara staff can't, because we're focussed on commercial releases right now, and partly that it needs someone to work on interfacing Cairo in place of CDraw. [...]
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The rest of the statement and more details about this in our thread "Update and news from Charles Moir".

Remi

[Giovanni]

I'm in Ubuntu right now, it's quite nice these days. Runs every bit as good a Vista (probably better in many ways).

Flash streaming, too? You're lucky!

Yes Ubuntu is very interesting project but I wouldn't define it as good as Vista. Not blaming Canonical devs here, but estabilished hardware and software brands.

By the way I confirm Inkscape is the way to go for many of us, have a look at Ivan Louette filters thread...

[RAMWolff44]

One thing I was not able to readily find was a way to apply drop shadows in Inkscape. I did see that the color bar was very much like that one that Xara X uses so that made me wonder if they indeed did borrows some of the Xara open source code. It's slicker but I get this strange jittering of the objects as I move them around the work area. Same issue I was having a few years back when they were still in heavy development with this project. Any idea how to get things to to move more smoothly in Inkscape??

Just heard from DAZ 3D, they are now considering a port of DAZ Studio over to Linix, never thought I'd see that happen!!!

[ivan louette]

Hi Richard,

I was also disappointed to see XaraLX forum closed. I moved to Ubuntu and then Kubuntu 8.10 in October and I updated flawlessly to Kubuntu 9.04 two days ago (It's even smoother and quicker).

About Inkscape I began to design svg filters last summer and in January Inkscape developers community asked me to join the program development with my work on these filters.

About Drop shadow it's included in svg filters. However in 0.46 it has a sort of bug : the shadow had a white tint, like a glow ! This specific filter has it's own interface a little bit like Xara's Live Effects. Afterwards you can open what is now called Filters Editor (in Devel versions, see below) and change the settings there. Of course this way isn't so interactive than Xara's way, but Filters Editor is extremely powerful ; together with the XML Editor it allows to change things in depth by modifying directly the Filters svg code. There you can even build your own filters from scratch, or add and combine several existing filters. That's how I do to design the new Filters tool set.

It's true that Inkscape rendering is not so fast than the fantastic Xara's one. But I can say that it has progressed a lot with the development versions. I hope it will become a priority next year (perhaps then 2010 Google Summer of Code will be helpful). Then they will have already some feedback from Inkscape 0.47 daily users and I am sure they will ask for more speed !

I very often use XaraLX to import and layout the png images exported from Inkscape. And I continue to use XXPro4 on XP afterwards for many tasks.

I don't know if you did try to install Inkscape Devel Win32 snapshots on your computer. They are updated almost daily and they always get the last version of my filters. You will find them at this address : http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/

But at the moment I went on this page I saw they removed all builds after 06 April (I don't know why they did it but I know they are now in the last bug hunting phase before 0.47 release). As the filters have greatly evolved from this time you could download here the last version of the filters.svg file : http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/...share/filters/ On Ubuntu it must replace the one in your usr/share/inkscape-devel/filters.

Otherwise you can also install the last Inkscape-Devel build for Ubuntu which is here : https://launchpad.net/~inkscape-nightly/+archive/ppa It's not recent but it works for most tasks and this is the one I use to design my filters. If you are on 9.04 simply add these two complete lines (not only the links) to your updates sources :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape-nightly/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape-nightly/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Today I finally did some sort of "Poster Edge" filter. But I think I will work a little bit more on it in next hours.

Enjoy !

ivan

[RAMWolff44]

Thanks so much Ivan. I really appreciate your taking the time to fill me on what's up with Inkscape. When I boot back into Ubuntu I'll for sure update to the version you used to create your filters. I really do hope they make speeding things up a priority, perhaps that will help with the issue I have when moving objects around the interface and them getting kind of jittery as I move them.

Best,

[ivan louette]

Thanks so much Ivan. I really appreciate your taking the time to fill me on what's up with Inkscape. When I boot back into Ubuntu I'll for sure update to the version you used to create your filters. I really do hope they make speeding things up a priority, perhaps that will help with the issue I have when moving objects around the interface and them getting kind of jittery as I move them.

Best,

Richard,

In the Devel versions you can go to Display/No Filters when you need to move very complex objects. I know this is not the best solution for fine tuning but it's already useful. This kind of momental solution is possible in free software...

kindly,
ivan