How do I turn a bitmap into editable shapes in Xara Designer Pro X?

[shiphen]

Hi

Okay I give up - How do I turn a bitmap into editable shapes in Xara Designer Pro X.
i.e. In my case have a screenshot of an website, and I want to get Xara to intelligently turn it into editable shapes so that I can do clean experiments on changing the colours of different areas etc.
I remember that there used to be a tool about 4 years ago in a previous version of Xara but I can't find it.

Cheers

J

[amoore]

The tool you're looking for is the Bitmap Tracer. It's still there on the Utilities menu.

You may want to search the forum on bitmap tracing for suggestions and comments. It's not always a satisfying process, although there are times the results can be fairly usable.

[angelize]

Without being able to see the image you are working on it's really hard to give you a method but a lot of times it is much simpler to recreate the individual items. Rather than using a screenshot try using the import from web feature. file> import from web> and type (or paste) the page url into the dialogue box. The text should come across as text and all the graphics should import as separate graphics they will be jpegs or pngs, but they should all be in place and you can recreate or trace separate pieces to get better results.

[mwenz]

If you have Acrobat installed and the plug-in is made available to Firefox, there is an icon towards the upper right that will make a PDF of any web page and import it. In general this is the fastest means and many items remain as vector in doing so and text is editable text. There will be clipped groups, which you can just hold down CTRL and click to be able to edit.

If you have a PD print driver installed, you can print to a PDF and import it.

With X, you can import web pages from the file menu. With this web site, there will be a lot of overlapping rectangles, etc, which need to be deleted. HTML sites will likely fare better.

The attached is of your post's page exported as a PDF from the Acrobat method.

Tracing a web page is an exercise in futility in comparison.

Mike

[csehz]

For individual graphics on the website the Bitmap tracer really can be usable too, maybe not needed even the 5 passes to result almost the same like the original

[glenngosack]

as a side bar - I tried the import from web and always get a message: Navigation to Web page was canceled is there a setting somewhere to affect this?

[pauland]

If that's an issue, why not save the page to a local directory, then load the assets from that?

[graphicsfactory]

What your wanting to do, will not solve your problem. Even if you managed to accurately auto trace the entire page, it would be VERY difficult to organize and rename the potential thousands of colors. The page may have one, two, three or four base colors. But, probably has lots of shades and tints. You should probably consider another approach.

As far as the auto tracer duplicating a photo exactly, why? What would be the point? The only advantage, may be, would be the ability to enlarge the image without any loss of quality.