Page Size Problem

I'm trying to do some artwork for a large sign. I have set the page units to centimetres (cm) and have tried to set the size to 297cm x 95cm. But I get the warning message that the page width is invalid. It tells me that it must be a positive non-zero measurement, and that the maximum for page and margins is about 9ft (2.75M).

So I tried setting it to 275cm, same message. Tried changing the units to metres and entered 2.75 x .95. Same warning. I even tried rounding up to 1m as .95 is presumably not a positive non-zero measurement but it makes no difference.

Am I being really thick here?

'about' ? .... helpful eh?

9ft is 2.7432 metres - perhaps reducing it a tad more.... ?

You'll have to reduce the Outer margin (Spread) to zero if you want 274cm.
By default it's 20cm and is used in the overall calculation.

There's been a lot said over the years about this silly page size restriction. Clearly it's not an easy thing for Xara to fix.

Yes it is a little vague isn't it.

I settled for 270cm with no outer margin in the end. The signmaker can add 25cm of black at his end (hopefully!).

I usually just divide the real dimensions by 10 or 100 or 1000 etc. in these situations - so for example, if I want a 6m x 2m sign, I create it as 6cm x 2cm in Xara and just keep in mind that it's actually meters :)

It's mostly not hard for the print shop etc. to just scale up :)

Unfortunately I used live effects (Chrome... as usual) so that wouldn't really be an option. So I ended up exporting a JPG then re-opening it in Photoshop to convert it to CMYK and added the required missing centimetres on each end.

Not ideal but I think I got there. Well it hasn't been sent back yet so hopefully all is fine.

I wonder if Xara will ever give us the ability to export CMYK bitmaps.

Xara have this from loooong long time.....
Just in TIF export dialog choose CMYK instead of RGB 24bit :)

Different word is how exactly work this in some cases.... but its there

Ah thanks. Never use TIFs normally, so never seen that dialogue.