Xara is strong but has huge weakness

[srdjan]

I am having the same problem because I am designing hi-res rollup posters. My solution is to create bitmap copy of every scaled image and effect. But this is slowing the whole production down.
This issue should be fixed.

[Danas_Anis]

So many replies here, thank you all.

First of all I am kind of anti Adobe man, I don't trust Adobe tools for anything. This opinion came to me 3 years ago. I actually come from film and 3D animation background. However times to times I have to go into graphics design.

I am a manager of online magazine about 3D arts and I experienced some issues with team so I had to do magazine my self. I am used to Corel Draw, unfortunately either there is something wrong with windows or my setup file is corrupted. So my suite doesn't work. Then my friend offered Xara.

So far I like it.

to answer some questions, no, the magazine is not intended to be for print, it is for online viewing.
I am on the magazine production occasionally so I am definitely not very interested in in design, after all it is Adobe program, I hate Adobe (adobe is in my worst ever apps black list).

yea I don't use Adobe Acrobat reader as well, actually the more I talk on forums the more I see that people don't use any higher than 7th version of Adobe reader or use something else like Foxit reader. heh

I completely agree that if Xara offer multi page features and is said to be good for brochure and magazines designs, they should look at this area because Xara is quite a good tool.

I think since there is Xara versions available for Linux they should look at this area as well. While other companies seems to be sleeping or well not be so interested in future Xara could make huge step in providing Linux version of Xara that would meet commercial print level, as I understand Xara LX is developed by someone else.

Anyway I am so grateful for your replies and offerings with interesting solutions. I will definitely check suggested apps. So if there will be another time me making a magazine, I will think which one is best solution for me.

As a work around I found creating image files of pages and replacing graphics in pages with these images works as a solution. if you would be interested I can give you the link to the mag I was doing.

[bshand1]

I haven't seen Scribus mentioned in this thread as a possible alternative.

The latest version (1.3.5 I think), while it's not InDesign, gets very close and it's OpenSource and of course free.

Scribus DTP

If you are used to InDesign the learning curve is not too steep

[posterart]

Have Xara 3.2 works perfect and after trial of Xara 5 I see no big deal. Web design is out, the photo thing is useless. The drawing tools are the same and excellent as usual. A needed change, the layers window is still weird, ugly or something.