Web Design

[mrforsythexeter]

I am a pro web designer (or like to think so) I have been playing with Xara X and its the business.. there is only a couple of things which I am hoping you can help with. The first thing is.. when i demo a site to a client.. I take stills along.. however i can see no way in Xara X to stop fonts from anti a.. so they always look blury which they wouldn't look like in a browser.. also do you know if the a new version will be comming out which will allow for text to be wrapped to objects?

Cheers Guys

[mrforsythexeter]

I am a pro web designer (or like to think so) I have been playing with Xara X and its the business.. there is only a couple of things which I am hoping you can help with. The first thing is.. when i demo a site to a client.. I take stills along.. however i can see no way in Xara X to stop fonts from anti a.. so they always look blury which they wouldn't look like in a browser.. also do you know if the a new version will be comming out which will allow for text to be wrapped to objects?

Cheers Guys

[gwpriester]

Hmmm? My browser anti-aliases text. Otherwise it would be very pixelated.

You can create a bitmap of your text in Xara (Create Bitmap Copy) then set the View Quality to Normal (Window > Quality > Normal) and export that way. But I don't know if that will help much.

There are bitmap fonts you can use for very small text that are not anti-aliased.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person


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<a href="http://www.xaraxone.com">
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[mrforsythexeter]

I don't want to export the text as a seperate object.. i am hopeing to take a complete still.. and show the client.. and yes you are right the browser does anti a... but not to the extentent of Xara X... and when you put the quaility to normal the rest of the image becuase ummm rubbish.

[Albacore]

My normal way to show clients proposed web sites is to have the site home pages hidden in layers and using XaraX. You can show the site with navigation on the side, on the top or what ever. You can easily show different headers, change font styles there and then and it looks much more professional than handing out printed paper or a snap shot and all fonts look crisp and sharp. You also can easily show drop down menus without having to produce any java script but everything is dead it is nor dynamic and it is just like your screen shots.

By using layes, revealing and then hiding each design proposal you can quickly build up a picture of what the client likes or dislikes. You then go away again and work on that provisional site and produce that home page site and make it dynamic but just the home page.

I use Adobe GoLive and I have just upgrade to the CS version which has the option of printing a PDF format which has made the showing of the site in a printed format oh so easy and I am fairly pleased with the new version as it does not crash to the same extent as GL 6.

Using XaraX as a show piece has gained me the occasional extra contract and there has been no lose of quality in the fonts. It works for me it maybe can work for you?

[grap41]

There is no way to just switch off anti aliasing for fonts that I know of.

We do exactly the same here. Design flats in Xara and then show them to clients with the caveat that they may not be *absolutely* identical when coded up. You'll have to think a suitable clause, but to be honest it's never been a problem.

Just tell them your using a Mac! They anti alias browser fonts. None of our browsers on Windows (XP or 2000) do, including IE 5, 5.5, 6+, Netscape 7 (inc the Mozilla family) or Opera 7.

best,
R


business | graphitedesign.net
portfolio | graphitedesign.co.uk
personnal | richardcassidy.com

[Charles Moir]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Just tell them your using a Mac! They anti alias browser fonts. None of our browsers on Windows (XP or 2000) do, including IE 5, 5.5, 6+, Netscape 7 (inc the Mozilla family) or Opera 7. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Windows XP has the world's greatest anti-aliasing that works in all apps except, unfortunately, Xara X. Go to Display Properties -> Appearance tab -> Effects and select ClearType font smoothing.

We've done a lot of research into this and a lot of side-by-side comparisons and nothing, absolutely nothing, gets close to the quality MS achieve with this. And that includes OS X, Photoshop, Illustrator and the latest Fireworks that has no less than 4 completely different ways to anti-alias text in an attempt to do small type well (it still can't). Although ClearType was designed for LCD use, it works fantastically well on all RGB monitors I've tried. If you've got XP you have to use this - and then all your text in all applications including all browsers is beautifully anti-aliased. In fact this is the only reason I moved from Windows2000 to XP.

Xara was one of the earliest ever apps to anti-alias text (15 years ago in the earliest predecessor versions, which is why we follow this area so closely) and we're aware that, as with all other graphics software, there are issues rendering high quality small type. We do have a number of rather laborious tips to create sub-pixel optimized text, but now that XP can do the job so well we advise customers to use OS text rendering where they can. And no Xara X doesn't have a way to stop font anti-aliasing while keeping everything else anti-aliased - it would look poor anyway, as it does when you set the display quality to normal. (If people are interested I could explain how to create pixel optimized text in Xara X for the cases where this is required).

In future Xara X versions (not X1) we're looking at the possibility of giving an option for ClearType rendering on the page, but this is unfortunately a very complex job.

[roman]

Charles wrote: (If people are interested I could explain how to create pixel optimized text in Xara X for the cases where this is required).

There is a special sort of PIXEL fonts used all over the internet in various applications. There are many reasons why is this existing (like the mentioned web design mock-ups), or PIXEL ART designs and graphics. That tutorial you have suggested would be very useful so please do it!

Here is example of how it should look.

[Sheff]

You really can't say you're using a Mac as an excuse for Xara's text issues.

At some point you might have try to explain, you're having CMYK problems because of Xara's export issues, then you're in the bind of them saying, "CMYK problems? Why, aren't you using a Mac?"

Then you'll have to confess you're using Xara on a PC and then you'll be caught in a lie.

If I recall correctly, someone once mentioned that cloning text on top of itself is a way of helping to compensate to improve legibility. Not a great workaround, but it might help.

Good Luck,

Sheffield Abella
www.sheff.com

[Klaus Nordby]

One great annoyance with XX is that it can't use bitmap system fonts -- the only kind of fonts which are really sharp and legible in small sizes, because they're pixel-drawn.

So I urge Charles and Xara to implement the use of bitmap fonts in the maintenance release. Yes, we will have to jump through some hoops, I guess, by turning off XX's native screen anti-aliasing and combining screen grab bitmaps, etc. - but if we could at least get the bitmap fonts to SHOW UP in XX's font menu, workarounds can be had. Now, you have to set your bitmap fonts in some other app and bring them in as graphics in XX, etc. Plain torture.

K
www.klausnordby.com/xara (big how-to article)
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/ (I was the first-ever featured artist in the Xone)
www.graphics.com (columnist, "The I of The Perceiver")