viewer for XAR files

[BobShrader]

Thanks for the tip on XnView. I downloaded a copy, and a quick check of some of my xar folders revealed it apparently won't read the thumbnail in a file created with previous versions of Xara. I could open the file with Xara X, resave and XnView would read the thumbnail.

Will explore some more, but XnView appears to be very fast.

Bob

[traceyp]

Don

If you'd read my earlier post in this thread you would have seen that Corel do NOT make their file formats public and I'm not convinced they ever will. Currently only .cpts up to version 6 are supported and only Corel supports the later versions and indeed ANY of their file formats (see my earlier post for further info).

Please don't blame Photodex, they've done a good job and after all, unless they have access to the file formats they can't support them and NEITHER can anyone else. Could be worth checking the other file formats out as well in case they are not supported for the same or similar reasons.

Tracey

[Michael]

Thanks for your pressure on Pierre-e Gougelet, the author of XnView. I have been working with him for more than two years and he really is doing a great job with XnView. I have done the dutch translation (and will be picking up the new translations once we're over this refurnishment of our home in Lkmaar...)

I have already asked him to add support for (then) CorelXara files, and he promissed to look into it when there would be more users asking him.

Indeed, Xara files do have a header or thumbnail. In it's first incarnation they were embeddeed GIF89, now Xara seems to use Gif87a and/or PNG. I would like to have Mark's opinion about it or , even better, have one of the other Xara developers contact Pierre-e.

I'm glad you are so enthusiast about XnView. It has a lot of potentials and features yet to be discovered, even for me! But then, mgr. Gougelet is developping this gem with fury and in a tremendous tempo!

[Sean Sedwards]

Early XAR & ART files are just EPS and have TIFF previews. Later XAR (v1.5 onwards) and WEB files are a custom format that usually use GIF previews, but may use other bitmaps or none in the case of WEB. x-View and Xara's own previewer can distinguish the various types (the latter will also interpret those that have no preview bitmap), but they do not produce a nice page of thumbnails for you to review. It wouldn't take much program intelligence for any of the general purpose viewers to work with all Xara files that contain bitmap previews, but don't expect a third party to write an interpreter.

The same holds true for Corel files. Even if the rest of the file is compressed and of an obscure format, the preview bitmap will likely be in an easily understood form at the beginning of the file. To do anything else would be to make it more difficult for their own previewing software.

Regards - Sean