That what I was trying to say Charles as usual you have explained it much better than me. This thread has given the opportunity to say thank you for a much improved programme. Still have to get my head around the Magix filters yet in Live Effects.
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That what I was trying to say Charles as usual you have explained it much better than me. This thread has given the opportunity to say thank you for a much improved programme. Still have to get my head around the Magix filters yet in Live Effects.
I really agree with Charles on this issue. One thing that would be a nice is to disable the Bold and Italic buttons on the tool bar for fonts that don't have those attributes.
Thanks Charles
you have confirmed what I thought - and yes Peter I for one am pleased that xara has a high standard font engine - of course :)
I can work round it no problem - thanks too for confirming this was standards led and to eliminate 'illegality' - I am happy with that
Ah all is forgiven - must keep those menfolk in line !:D
I agree with the decision not to synthesize fonts, but am getting annoyed with this warning box coming up every time. I understand that if it does nothing then it's not available. Can you put a "Don't show me this warning again" checkbox on the warning notice, so that it's not so annoying.
I agree with Robert .... Missed his post .... If the Bold and Italic buttons are disabled if they are not available then you don't need the annoying warning box.
Did I mention that the warning box is annoying ........
Charles,
Thank you for your detailed explanation.
Congratulations to you and your team on the new version.
BQ
But, is there a way that Xara 4 could "tag" the synthesized text (perhaps automatically adding a name to the Name Gallery) so that the user could easily audit there old files when opened in Xara 4.
Oops, I see by a previous posting, there is something shown in the Name Gallery. So if I select the radio button in the gallery will it in fact select the "desynthesized" characters? Can't test this on the PC I have at the moment.
Personally, I'll miss the ease at making something bold/italic if the font doesn't have that kind of variant. Most of the work I do with Xara is with graphics that eventually end up exported as PNG's for use in software/web pages and hardly ever for print purposes.
I also totally understand the decision to remove that kind of manky code from the code base (being a developer myself) and the sense of liberation you get as a coder when you finally get to rid yourself of something that's horrible to work with, update and even understand.
What would be neat (if it were possible, and I don't know if it is) would be if options could be set up so that if you click bold for a font that doesn't have a bold variant it automatically adds an outline to the text of some thickness that you set in options. Likewise if italicizing skewed the text by some set amount that you could control. For those of us that are synthesizing ourselves (where needed) it would be a time saver for manually doing that and at the same time making sure that all bold/italic text in a given font looks the same. Both options would have a dialog box that pops up to tell you what's happening (with one of those "don't show this again") ticks at the bottom. That way the cleaner font handling remains because the synthesizing is done outside of the font layout engine.
In any case, I'd also like to get on the bandwagon to have the bold/italic buttons disabled if the current text object/selected text/font doesn't support those variants. It seems like it would be a cleaner interface. Buttons shouldn't be presented if they won't do anything when you press them (though I realize that it's probably doing that to remind people of exactly WHY the option doesn't exist).
Daniel, although I understand your trouble, using fake bold and/or italic is a practice going against basic aesthetics principles. Your business cards look nice - why not just buy the real bold variant of Futura and update your base file? It's not that expensive solution, and the bizcards will look even better.
Whilst I personally dislike synthesised fonts and would never use them, I'm surprised Xara have gone this far. Whilst they may be a no-no in Adobeland, Microsoftland is fine with them and its population (which is fairly large) expects to be able to set bold/oblique on anything.
There are also some inconsistencies, such as changing the font from one that supports bold/italic to one that doesn't. This case doesn't generate the Annoying Warning™, and keeps the bold/italic markers, but silently renders them the same as the base font.
I suspect that I am not alone in never having known of the font designer's disgust that we have used a Bold button wrongly. If this is part of Xtreme's 'growing up', I'll try to grow up with it.
Adobe is not consistent: Illustrator CS3 doesn't allow synthesised fonts, but Fireworks CS3 does. Perhaps this is because Illustrator is primarily used for things going to print and Fireworks for things to be exported for webpages? Xtreme does both so is bound to upset one camp or the other.
What to do with Xtreme's Bold/Italic buttons ... it's easy to poke fun at Illustrator's interface, but I think in this respect, it is superior to Xara's: given we've learned this week that the buttons are a fabrication and merely a shortcut to selecting a different font style, Illustrator's toolbar may look uglier but it's easier to work with because only the actually-available options are presented:
If the alternative is having Bold/Italic buttons that don't 'work', or worse, that generate the Annoying Error, I'd much rather see the Illustrator-like pulldown.