.. just discovered something that might be useful for others trying to import drawings from solidworks (probably applies to other CAD software too)
A real bugbear has always been that most cad software reduces nice curves to a series of lines, which makes it a) really time consuming to modify in xara, and b) makes the file larger than it needs to be.

The solution I found yesterday is to PRINT to PDF rather than export to PDF.. not sure why solidworks would do this - maybe there's a speed sacrifice with displaying PDFs that contain lots of curves.

if anyone else has solidworks, it would be great if you can confirm (it might just be the setup on my computer)