Not being able to buy Illustrator I have been enjoying almost all of the 100 HeathenX Inkscape tutorials and learned a lot from them.

We began using Inkscape for technical illustrations at work and that lead to the search for a more general vector tool to supplement our present bitmap tool (Paint Shop Pro X2). As you know by now we chose Xara Xtreme 5

I have spent a lot of time with Inkscape now and the change to Xara is a little slow. There's a lot of little differences and several Inkscape features that you are doing in another way in Xara. Things like stroke and fill being separately able to use colour, fill, blur and transparancy in Inkscape.

Xara however has features that makes life a lot easier and faster and it has a nicely optimized user interface and that means a lot when you are using it at work. I can really feel the number of years going into all those shortcuts.

Today I was trying to redo HeathenX tutorial 46 and I fell on my face really fast There's a huge number of little things you have to do different to get to the same results and I will have to relearn a lot to be efficient in Xara. The first thing was the shape of the dogtag, in Inkscape you have two controls for corner radius and I hade to convert the rectangle to an edible shapoe to make the outer shape.

Just to let you know that there's a lot of newbie questions coming! I am a huge fan of video tutorials and I have seen every Xara tutorial I could find. If there are more tutorials on the subject of drawing illustrations, handling shapes etc. I would like to know where to find them.

best regards

JimR