Report and suggestions after Xara Free Trial experience

[M.U.D.]

Things I really like about Xara (I liked most things about Xara):

Left and right-click to select fill and outline colour;

Ability to modify the nudge distance using combinations of shift, alt and ctrl keys;

Drop copy (right-click and drag, or "+" button while left-click dragging);

Cut and paste opacity masks (what a pleasure);

Soft groups (grouping across layers without moving the objects out of their layers, although it does seem to hamper the alignment tool, especially "distribute centres");

Cut and pasting objects as bullets;

Cutting and pasting objects as text characters;

Ease with which buttons and control panels can be dragged around and customised;

Ability to create short cuts to view Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black plates (makes it easy to check your overprint settings, although it would be nice if you could have shortcut to "Show Printer Colors" or if one could save a template that has "Show Printer Colors" as the default colour view setting);

Crisp snapping;

Quick access to feather control;

Ability to drag colours via the names (or was it via the colours gallery?) gallery from one document to the other;

All the paste options (paste attribute, paste location, paste opacity, etc);

The Help file is very good, and I like the fact that one doesn't have to go on the Internet to access the Help file;

At first I wasn't sure about the black UI, but actually came to like it, and now other "grey" interfaces seem really grey and dull.

Love the fact that text that doesn't fit into a paragraph box still shows – as a light grey (I can see this saving one lots of hassles�I'm sure many have experienced the embarrassing scenario of trying to explain to a client why text is missing when working in one of the competitor's vector programs, because you had simply tweaked a paragraph text box to improve the design and thereby inadvertently and unknowingly lost a line of text);

Ability to easily crop and colour adjust raster images;

Ability to pull at the edges of a page to resize them (although if one could also pull the top and left sides, that would be even more fantastic!)

The names gallery is quite useful, seems to fulfill some of the functions that AI's "select similar" menu provides (select text objects, select same fill, select same outline, etc).

When you have a rectangle with curved/rounded corners, you can drag one side of the rectangle to change its length or width and the curved corners don't become distorted or change their curve setting

Ease with which arrowheads can be applied to lines (illustrators often need to apply labels to their illustrations, and arrows are essential for this).

Editing nodes and control handles (when using shape editor tool) that are distinct and visible (unlike other programs where you need magnifying glasses to find them).

... And of course the Xara TalkGraphics Forum is terrific! Friendly and helpful atmosphere.