Xara Designer Pro 11 - Convert text to curves

[aimcleod]

Thanks mwenz for all your info. The last file I sent yesterday was editable, it appears they opened the wrong file. After exporting several times I will now create a new vector and use a friends computer with illustrator to avoid possible future problems. We are always learning.

[hseiken]

I've found working with some projects in Xara and Adobe products back and forth, Xara tends to be good at reading Adobe formats for the most part but kind of not great in spitting out what Adobe software expects. Frequently, because of how Xara handles it's shapes and such, I imagine it's hard for the program to sort exactly what you want to retain: The image you currently see or the shapes themselves and it tends to default to keep the shapes even if the image is changed, which is typically what happens, especially when it comes to clipping masks, outlines, text, etc.

Essentially, if you want to ensure that you get exactly what you have in Xara is what shows up in Adobe you essentially have to eliminate anything special that Xara does and that Adobe does. In other words, for the least amount of headaches, if you know you're just going to export to Adobe for sake of a final approval/tweaking, convert everything (even lines) into shapes. If you have clipping masks, unclip them and instead combine the shapes (you'll have to duplicate the shape you use as a mask for each shape you cut, so you'll have to plan/design for this...it's not terrible, but if you forget about this, it can cause excessive work on this part) in order to properly cut what was masked so that they're just shapes floating on top of each other.

Finally, after you'd done all of this, you can export to Adobe and it will normally load right if you pre-arranged all your shapes in terms of what is on top/middle/bottom so that it looks 'right'. Now and again, an order might be changed but it's easier than trying to figure out what exactly is going wrong. You've already eliminated most of the compatibility problems between the two programs by converting everything to shape.

As well, be weary of types of blending/transparencies and feathering you use as well. If you plan on doing excessive shading, it might be best to export an image as a pdf rather than shapes as a pdf as there will be slight differences between the two programs. Again, it's mostly due to Adobe updating more often so even if Xara had a perfect exporter, it'd only be a week before it's liable to not be perfect again due to the constant updates of the Adobe suite.

I hope this helps and this is only from my experience, but I've found that if I know I have to work with someone who's using Illustrator, it's best to simplify and remove any special features of either's vector graphics tools...if there's too much to 'fix' then I just export images to pdf with the images at 2x the intended print/display resolution.

EDIT: Keep in mind when I suggest the 2x image stand ins for vector art/text, it's in the expectaction you are making something for desktop/digital printing.

[aimcleod]

@hseiken I really appreciate this information and I am sure this will help other people with the same problem. Thanks for taking the time to post this feedback.

[Sadler]

Surely there's no need to convert text to curves in the document. Text can be converted during the PDF export.

[mwenz]

One can. And it generally works perfectly. But I chose to recommend manually doing so because of the issues the OP was facing. Doing it manually means one absolutely knows it has occurred.

[Sadler]

One can. And it generally works perfectly. But I chose to recommend manually doing so because of the issues the OP was facing. Doing it manually means one absolutely knows it has occurred.

One can use windscreen wipers to wipe the screen and, generally, they work perfectly, but I clean my windscreen manually so that I know absolutely that it is clean.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the OP. In my experience, if I send a PDF to others they generally don't have the fonts I choose and hence...and I'd rather have one editable file rather than having to continually convert text to shapes. I absolutely trust the Xara PDF export and I think the OP would do well to trust it too. There is full rundown of the features that the various versions of PDF support in the Xara help.

[mwenz]

One can use windscreen wipers to wipe the screen and, generally, they work perfectly, but I clean my windscreen manually so that I know absolutely that it is clean.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the OP. In my experience, if I send a PDF to others they generally don't have the fonts I choose and hence...and I'd rather have one editable file rather than having to continually convert text to shapes. I absolutely trust the Xara PDF export and I think the OP would do well to trust it too. There is full rundown of the features that the various versions of PDF support in the Xara help.

Good for you.

And I hope that you never have an issue. But if/when you do, convert the type to curves manually.