This isn't something I've seen much discussion about on these forums. Apparently V5 now embeds fonts used in documents automatically into the xar file. Specifically, it apparently embeds the character shapes of letters of a font used to ensure WYSIWYG and portability of xar documents.

I'm wondering whether this means that the actual characters of the used font are stored in the xar file, or whether some new vector recreation is created as a substitute. It would be interesting to see what happens when more of the same character is inserted on another machine without the font (adding characters not used is not supposed to work, so it's like the 'only embed characters in use' option in Word). This isn't easy for me to test. Does anyone have any weird fonts they can upload in a xar file here? I also wonder: if fonts are embedded, how is this allowed for fonts that aren't supposed to be embedded?

The advantage of only embedding fonts used is retaining exact readability and minimising file size. Embedding the full font would retain editability as well but at the cost of filesize (and maybe copyright issues).

That this feature has been introduced into Xara suggests they may be preparing to compete with PDF as a portable document format. We can only dream; if only Xara had a dedicated .xar reader (like they used to back in 1995)...

At least we now apparently don't need to check the document properties to see which fonts are missing for V5 files.