Crayons for Xara

[ss-kalm]

Thank you Frances

[wizard509]

Thank you Francis,
One of those yellow colors in particular I seem to have a fondness for. Why I don't know, but thank you!

[HayTay]

OK, I just had to give XPal and JCWpad a try. Rather than just recreate what angelize had already done, I decided to expand on the Crayola crayon theme. In addition to the 120 current colors, I added the 13 colors that have been retired since 1990. As a reference I used the Standard Colors chart provided on Wikipedia's List of Crayola crayon colors page.

The attached ZIP file contains both the .PAL and .JCW files that define the 133 crayons color palette. Just unzip it and copy and paste either the .PAL file, the .JCW file, or both into the palettes folder wherever your version of XX, XXP, XP&GD, XDP, etc. resides on you hard drive (for example: C:\Program Files\Xara\Xara Xtreme Pro 5\Palettes). You'll have to close the version of Xara software you're using and fire it back up to be able to access the new palette(s) from the Color Gallery (F9 or from the Utilities > Galleries > Color Gallery menu). As noted earlier, right-click on the folder entry and select 'Show in Color Line' to (obviously) have the colors accessible from the color line. If you use either of these two files the colors will appear as 'diamonds' on the color bar. The .PAL version shows the RGB color values while the .JCW version will display the color names when the mouse pointer is placed over the new color swatches that appear on the color line.

I got carried away and also created a Crayola Crayon 133 Colors template .XAR file that has all the 133 crayon colors listed as 'named colors' so they show up on the color line as 'square' color swatches. If you want to use this template file instead, the .PAL and .JCW files DO NOT NEED to be copied to the 'palettes' folder(s). Just open the file with whatever version of Xara software that you usually use to open .XAR files. If you'd like this template to be available from the File > New documents list just save the file as a template once you've opened it, or, copy the file to the appropriate 'templates' folder of your installation (for example: C:\Program Files\Xara\Xara Xtreme Pro 5\Templates\ENG). The colors will automatically populate the color line when the file is opened. I placed the 'named color' filled shapes that make this possible on their own locked layer. The template colors are still visible but you can hide them using the layer gallery if you don't want them shown on the pasteboard above the page. Oh, I created the template using XXP5 but it should be able to be opened in other versions of Xara Xtreme (including the new Xara Designer software series).

I hope that's enough explanation for someone to use at least one of the 3 files provided.

Thanks to Frances for blazing the crayon color trail and inspiring me to learn something new. Also, many thanks to Brian Etherington for his hard work on XPal and Stilianos Doussis for all of his time spent creating the JCWpad utility. I couldn't have created the palette files as easily without either of you! A well deserved 'tip-of-the-hat' to both your efforts.

Happy coloring,
Harry

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[zaphodeist]

Nice one Harry! XPal is a neat application isn't it

[angelize]

Cool Harry, It's interesting though that when you load a .pal file through the colour palettes gallery that it loads on the colourline as diamonds. If you drag a .pal file from explorer to your Xara page the colours load on the colourline as squares, which means they are named colours. The names show up as colour numbers.

[HayTay]

Hmmmm... I didn't realize it did that Frances. Of course I had to check it out and you're right (of course!). Squares if you drag 'n drop, diamonds if loaded from the gallery. Very interesting. I guess the drag 'n drop method works the same way as when opening my template file, the colors are picked up as named colors as derived from the RGB color values (since the .PAL file contains only the RGB values).

That kinda makes sense.

[lcbarker]

Frances, Harry,

Thanks for the crayon palette. It's beautiful.

After reading your posts on how the the palettes and gallery act differently in different situations I had to play with it. What I found is that if a palette is loaded automatically into the Color Gallery because it's stored in the Palettes directory, the colors do not automatically appear on the colorline unless you right-click the palette title in the Color Gallery and choose, "Show in Color Line". With that checked it will appear as diamonds when Xara is opened. Of course, if you leave "Show in Color Line" unchecked, or uncheck it, the palette will not appear on the colorline. And, if "Show in Color Line" is checked, then when you drag a color from the Color Gallery to an object, then that color on the colorline is noted with the little black diamond for either line or fill. But if "Show in Color Line" is not checked, then if you drag-drop a color from the Color Gallery to an object then that color does not appear on the colorline at all.

However, whether "Show in Color Line" is checked or not, if you have an object selected and double-click on a color in the Color Gallery, then that color will fill the object and appear as a named color on the colorline. The same is true if you single-click on the color name in the Color Gallery and then click the Apply button in the menu area at the top of the Color Gallery.

Another interesting thing about the drag-drop feature. If you drag-drop from either the colorline or the Color Gallery you can color the paste board, the page, the object border or the object fill depending on where it is dropped. At first I was confused because it seemed to happen randomly. But then I noticed that a marker beside the cursor would change shape, and the shape indicated where it would "land". If the shape was a white rectangle the color would "land" on either the page or the paste board, depending on the location of the tip of the cursor. If the shape was a smaller white square then the color would "land" on the fill. But if the shape was a narrow black rectangle then the color would "land" on the border. New discovery for me!

Interesting

Les

[DanDaBear]

Very nice! Thank you Frances!
(I posted this 2 days ago, I don't know what happened to it(?))

[angelize]

You mean I'm not going nuts? I thought posts that I had seen once were disapearing later. There must be some sort of glitch with the forum.

[zaphodeist]

*** think? At least there's no c********p y*t