Bitmap Brushes?

[Albacore]

Sorry to take so long to come back but work came in the way, a right bugger when that happens.
Yes I agree with you that is a vector brush.
All I have to do to rearrange the brush is to edit it or change the line to a shape and then ungroup. That would be a Scatter Brush in AI.

Maybe I should have stated that it feels like bitmap brush for all the control you have with them.

What if I wanted to draw hair in Xara? All that you have to do in AI is draw the individual lines, group them, save as a brush and then use that brush. In the drawing shown there are 3 lines drawn with three different brushes just drawn it's so easy. You can change the colour at will and if it is a calligraphy brush using the direct selection tool you can edit the shape so easily which is impossible to do in Xara.

I have tried to show the differences using roughly the same brushes in both programmes but have kept them as small as possible. I just think that the brushes in Xara in a lot of ways let the programme down. At the moment I am doing a lot of either pen & ink drawings where I scan them in, then use the outlines and colour over the shapes and outlines. The other way which shows the poor control that we have in Xara over brushes is when I hand trace over the image and try to get the variable line thickness as I can in AI. It is just inferior for both an Art brush and a Calligraphy brush even spending loads of time trying to get a set of brushes as a template so that I can use them time and again. The other problem is that if it is a large drawing using many brushes the re-draw time and file size goes skywards and of course the occasional crash.