unknown png error occured

[stuart1980]

For some reason I struggle along with Xara for my desktop publishing work, constantly enduring the 'serious error from Xara Xtreme' crashes which cause me to lose everything periodically. Recently I opened my file which has taken many weeks of work and get 'unknown PNG error occurred'. I can't open the file. Any suggestions on how I can get it back? I only want the text, is there anyway of viewing this without the graphics?

[steve.ledger]

Hi Stuart,

Please see this Read the FAQs thread

If this doesn't help you might like to post your .xar file for further assistance?

[stuart1980]

Thanks. I have managed to get it back because thankfully I transferred the file to my other computer using transferbigfile.com on Friday, so I have lost a bit but nothing too bad.

I would say though, that I am experiencing so many problems with Xara crashing that I shouldn't be using it for desktop publishing. The lack of a page manager, the inexplicable and confusing page scroll up when you duplicate a page or insert one (try duplicating a template page 10 times in a 100 page document and you'll see what I mean), and the constant crashes really shows that this program is not designed for such work. The extremely poor save feature, with no auto save has also cost me serious amounts of time. I know you should save constantly, and in Xara that means saving in a different file due to potential corruption so sometimes I have 70 files of the same document, but this can be difficult when you are absorbed in the work and forget about it.

I know someone on here said once that you should write the text in a different program like Word, but when you import it into Xara you either can choose rich text - which messes everything up and has compatability issues, or unformatted, which means you have to go through and reformat everything. With the absence of any real proper text support such as proper paragraph alignment, good auto numbering and spacing, formatting takes me hours and hours. I work with documents with pictures spanning about 10,000 words, so you can see the difficulty.

What (cheap) programs are there that would offer the capability I am after? I love the graphics manipulation in Xara, but its just got the stage where I accept that I have to go back and redo work due to the constant crashing, and this isn't really what I should be doing.

[steve.ledger]

Stuart autobackup is available (each time you save, a backup is created).
You can enable this with XaReg.
The link is in my signature.

Xtreme should not be crashing as often as you are suggesting.
Have you tried reinstalling it and/or checking your computer RAM?