Need XAR file viewer

[Contours]

I'm approaching 1,000 XAR files on my PC and find that I'm spending too much time opening older files just to find what they contain.

What I need is a program that can provide a quick view—top to bottom—of all the "pages" in a file ... like a PDF viewer does for PDF files. Certainly, it can be a limited view, say 200 pixels wide. (And just for the record: opening Xara, itself, is just too cumbersome for this.)

A search for XAR Viewer turned up numerous recommendations for thumbnail viewers, like xnView. They do admiral jobs, but they're not what I need. My searches also revealed that this need has been discussed on and off for 15+ years.

Has anyone found a content viewer? If not, what are some "best practice" ways to manage large XAR libraries? Personally, I've tried exporting as PDFs and found it to be very time consuming.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Michael]

Two promising ways:

https://www.reaconverter.com/convert/xar_to_pdf.html

or

https://en.pdf24.org/doc2pdf.

Haven't tried them myself (testing at the moment) bit they might come in handy ..

[Contours]

Two promising ways:

Yes, I've been working in this same area ... initially, trying the utility xnConvert ... and then reading up on others.

What I'm finding is that these utilities are only able to "see" the thumbnail that Xara produces. So the conversion files they produce are simply that as a file content placeholder. In a way, it's understandable, given the complexity of the Xara rendering engine. But it also means these utilities are overselling their handling of the XAR format. I'll stand corrected if any true conversion program is put forth.

Meanwhile, I'm fashioning a script that can open each file on a target directory ... print to a PDF ... and then close the file. Batch processing my main directories will at least provide a step forward. It will also help with a problem I've faced for years: the need to search Xara files for text content.

Thanks for your response.