Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features

[Acorn]

@Ben, thank you for the sample file. It clocks in at 119.3kB

I have to assume that the untick of the Preview in the Save Template dialog is where you ought to be able to remove the Preview image.
It appears not to work in XPro+ so I believe it has to be a Bug.
I will leave you to tackle Xara with this as you have more skin in the game. There may be other associated issues that you should raise at the same time.

Your original numbered bullets (1} to (4), I think, are now answered, if not fully addressed:

(1) File Size.
To 'remove' the Preview image, my current fix is to create a very short first page that is blank. I estimate the Preview file is ~4kB.
You may wish to experiment with making the first page 0.5in x 0.5in to reduce this to near nothing. I'll leave the analysis to you and your expert. I find my poodle's eyes cross when he has to do sums.
You should lose the Scale to fit width setting else your HTML render will scale the view setting to fit your browser.

As a design approach, I have placed a Title & Revision section into the MouseOver layer so that the Preview image is monochromatic (here, white). You could colour code your Notes if you wanted.
The first page filename is a mix of abbreviated Title and Revision Date.
I set up an altered Template (US Letter 1-column - no Preview.xar) for this. It is 7.33kB. You need to accept this as your overhead.
Should you export this as PDF (enabled with Web Properties > Export > Viewer options > PDF download then the output file size is 5.42kB - US_Letter_1-column_-_no_Preview.pdf
I took your XAR file and added it into my new Template and got this: 2024Feb26 Make the Boeing 737 MAX safe again (Acorned).xar, it is now 38kB with PDF 25.9kB - 2024Feb26_Make_the_Boeing_737_MAX_safe_again__Acorned_.pdf

The greater reduction is where I applied your (2) ask.

(2) Externally linked images.
I took your header group and exported it as an SVG - BWTG.svg.
I immediately linked to it in its external location, saving 77.8kB of internal file storage.
I also make it Repeat on all note pages as well as make it Repel text under.
This replaces it: <img class="xr_ap" src="revision-yyyymondd_html_files/BWTG.svg" alt="" title="" style="left:0px;top:17px;width:816px;height:76px;" >; just over 128B per reference.

The benefit is you can preserve all your 300+dpi images in their own repository and reference to them for any of your Notes.

For your book, where the images are pure vector, they will be stored in Xara's compressed FLARETEXT format. I would not outload such items.
In passing, there has been no public update of the XAR Format Document that I have seen.
I would also assume UTF-8: <meta charset="utf-8">, probably around the time the applications went 64-bit. It is also probably USC-2.

(3) Equation editor.
Is possible with the right product.

(4) Book size.
I would simply append your collated Notes into one long XAR (100+ pages) and export as PDF.
If your images are externally-linked and in-line diagrams are vector, there will be no quality issues and no in-depth editing needed.


(*) Obsidian.
The MarkDown equivalent file is 8.16kB with links to the above SVG: Make the Boeing 737 MAX safe again.txt - replace .txt with .md (a TG restriction).
I would use Xara exclusively for diagrams and export each as SVG into the same folder as the Notes so linkage is just ![[BWTG.svg]] and is "anchored".
they could be in their own location and externally-link as well but keeping one Obsidian Vault for Notes and diagrams does all the heavy lifting.

Add a few hundred Notes and images and then you see the power of Obsidian's Graph view:



Not to mention Search:



Acorn