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Hi all,
I've been using Corel Xara for ages, was delighted to discover Xara X and have just downloaded and bought it (waiting for the CD to arrive). Thing is, I can't work out the brush thing properly and I'm not sure if it's working correctly...
For instance, if I decide to use the airbrush, it's blue. I can change the color of the brush stroke *after* I've drawn it by clicking the color as normal in Xara; but what I want to do is be able to get a (say) red airbrush which will draw every stroke as red. I.e. I want to set the default color of the brush on the fly... If I change the default (local?) color, i.e. with no object selected, I still get a blue airbrush. However, if I have the edit brush window open, then click anywhere (even the title bar) on that window, the stroke changes color to the default color I selected, as if the color changes aren't "taking" until the edit brush window gets focus.
Is this normal behaviour, a known bug in the download version or is something screwy on my system? Considering the slickness of the Xara interface I can't believe that the designers expect one to create a new brush for every color one wishes to use! (Presumably to do that, I'd have to have a soft edged circle on the pasteboard, keep changing the color of that circle, and hitting "create brush"..? The only other way would to keep drawing in blue then applying color changes retrospectively?
Many, many thanks for any help with this.
BTW, I just love the rest of the updates from Corel Xara. The bevel tool is just *amazing*. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_redface.gif[/img])
Jax
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Hi all,
I've been using Corel Xara for ages, was delighted to discover Xara X and have just downloaded and bought it (waiting for the CD to arrive). Thing is, I can't work out the brush thing properly and I'm not sure if it's working correctly...
For instance, if I decide to use the airbrush, it's blue. I can change the color of the brush stroke *after* I've drawn it by clicking the color as normal in Xara; but what I want to do is be able to get a (say) red airbrush which will draw every stroke as red. I.e. I want to set the default color of the brush on the fly... If I change the default (local?) color, i.e. with no object selected, I still get a blue airbrush. However, if I have the edit brush window open, then click anywhere (even the title bar) on that window, the stroke changes color to the default color I selected, as if the color changes aren't "taking" until the edit brush window gets focus.
Is this normal behaviour, a known bug in the download version or is something screwy on my system? Considering the slickness of the Xara interface I can't believe that the designers expect one to create a new brush for every color one wishes to use! (Presumably to do that, I'd have to have a soft edged circle on the pasteboard, keep changing the color of that circle, and hitting "create brush"..? The only other way would to keep drawing in blue then applying color changes retrospectively?
Many, many thanks for any help with this.
BTW, I just love the rest of the updates from Corel Xara. The bevel tool is just *amazing*. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_redface.gif[/img])
Jax
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Good to have you here.
Xara took Xara back from Corel over a year ago and it was a good thing they did. Corel had great plans to let die a quiet death.
To change the color of the air brush, and this will work on many of the other brushes:
Draw a line and apply the blue air brush stroke.
Click the Edit Brush button on the Infobar at the top of the screen.
Select the Fill Properties tabbed section. Check the radio button
Gary Priester
Moderator Person
<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>
XaraXone
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To change the color of the air brush, and this will work on many of the other brushes:
Draw a line and apply the blue air brush stroke.
Click the Edit Brush button on the Infobar at the top of the screen.
Select the Fill Properties tabbed section. Check the radio button All Brush Colors.
Now when you right click on a color, the airbrush will become that color.
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Thanks for the info, unfortunately this is what I've been trying and it doesn't seem to do what I want; which is to change the color of the airbrush permanently.
I'm well used to (Corel) Xara's regular behaviour whereby clicking a color (or any other attribute) when an object is selected will change the color of that object, so if I draw a black line, then click red, the line will turn red. But normally, if no object is selected, the color clicked will become the "default" (not sure if that's the right term in XaraSpeak [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] so that any further lines I draw will be automatically red.
Indeed, using the default line from the lines gallery, that is what happens.
With the other tools it doesn't. (Using the airbrush as an example again)...
I draw a line. It's blue. I open the edit brush palette, select "all brush colors" and my blue airbrush line turns red. Great. However, when I draw another airbrush line, it's blue again. In the edit brush palette "Local colors replace" has switched back to "no brush colors".
So, how about changing the color *then* opening the edit brush palette? Well, if I do that with no line selected, the "Local colors replace" section is all greyed out; with the "no brush colors" option "selected"; once I draw a line, only the "all brush colors" radio button becomes active and clickable; but of course this is only for the line I've drawn and once I draw a new line it's back to blue again. No matter what I do after this, the latter 2 options remain greyed out but the thing keeps reverting to the *unselectable by me* "no brush colors".
If I open the edit brush palette with a line selected, then all 3 options are available, with "no brush colors" selected. I can select "all brush colors", great. But that again will only work for the line selected. So I hit Escape to deselect all objects, click that "all brush colors" radio, right click red, draw a line and *gaaaaaaaaah* it's back to "no brush colors". It doesn't make any difference if I've hit "save" in the edit brush palette or not.
IOW, whatever I do, with the line tools other than "default", which works fine, I'm stuck with "no brush colors" and various of the edit options greyed out, depending on when I opened the edit brush dialog!
Uh, and while I've been typing this and playing around, somehow I've gotten it into the state where it's keeping the "all brush colors" option selected, but ignoring it... i.e. the edit palette says "all brush colors", I right click red, draw a line and it's *blue again* (jax starts chewing the carpet).
So, in summary, whatever I do, I'm stuck with drawing blue lines then retrospectively altering their color. Is this right?
The edit brush options thing doesn't seem to be consistent at all in its operation; does this sound like something is up with my installation?
(The version number is 1.0c, running on Win98SE on an Athlon XP1800+ with 1GB of Ram).
Many thanks if you can devote any more time to my problem here, and sorry for the long posting [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Jax
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Jax,
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>(The version number is 1.0c, running on Win98SE on an Athlon XP1800+ with 1GB of Ram). <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
You should consider to remove 512 MB of RAM on your machine - Windows 98, ME can NOT address them. They are superflous like a hole in a head ;-}
The only OS that supports, addresses and uses more than 512 MB RAM is NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional and LINUX or any other Unix OS.
jens
jens g.r. benthien
designer
http://jens.highspeedweb.net
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If you don't know how to dream you'll never be a designer.
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In the brush gallery - right click on the airbrush tool - select copy brush graphic to the clipboard. Paste the brush graphic into a document - change the colour - create a new brush. Remember to change the setting of the new brush to be the same as the old one.
Brushes are normally only saved in the document you are working on - if you want the brush to be available all the time you need to save a document containing a sample of the brush into the brushes folder. Be warned however that too many brushes loaded at startup can cause problems.
Christine
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Many thanks, Christine; are you saying there is no way to simply change the color of any brush but the default brush "live"; i.e. just by clicking colors? Having to create a new brush every time I want to use a different color seems phenomenally inefficient and I can't see myself doing it- the way I work (and I'm sure many other people do) I expect to be able to just change the color of the brush with a single click, as with all the other tools in Xara! Is there no way around this?
Jens; thanks for your input regarding memory, but I did a lot of checking before I spent all that money on RAM... Microsoft clearly state the maximum under Win98 is 1Gb. It's easy to demonstrate when the RAM is getting used simply by opening a very large image in Photoshop and watching the "physical memory in use" chart in the system monitor applet shoot up past 512Mb!
I've seen quite a lot of debate about this in the Windows usenet groups; many people argue for all sorts of low physical limits (I remember way back when I built my last machine that people were saying 64Mb was the maximum) but the consensus seems to be that 1GB is the true physical max.
Jax
Jax
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... because Win 98, ME and XP page the rest to the HD. Simple thing to cheat the users, he?
Get a mem checker from c't magazine and you'll be amazed like millions of others how Win 98, ME and XP limit the address space.
But if your belief or faith will make you happy keep listening to Microsoft.
Kind of weird what they tell you in a training for a MSCE course on NT, 2000 Pro - it's the only spot where they tell the professionals the truth... and if you would do the math you'd figure out the conclusion / result for yourself very fast.
jens
jens g.r. benthien
designer
http://jens.highspeedweb.net
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If you don't know how to dream you'll never be a designer.
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Hi Jens,
I dind't come here to argue about Windoze, and I'm hardly a great fan of Microsoft.
However, I may as well say that I researched this a lot. To paraphrase one person posting to usenet; "Microsoft would have had to patch the windows memory manager deliberately, back in 1995 when most machines had 4 or 8Mb, to pretend to use more memory than it does. It fools every memory checking program (including one I've written myself). For what reason would they do this, in the days when 512Mb of memory was unthinkable anyway?"
Put it this way; however evil they are, there's no reason for them to program Windows to deliberately lie about how much physical RAM it's using... and if it really doesn't use more than 512Mb of RAM, then there is a built in lie about it, because the system monitor reports otherwise.
There's a relevance to this, because of course graphics apps are memory *hogs*.
As a test, I just got Micrografx Picture Publisher to thumbnail a directory with large graphics files in it; the thumnnailer isn't well written and allocates memory for every graphic it scans, so watching System Monitor, in no time at all the "unused physical memory" had dropped to around 180Mb. The "swapfile in use" was showing at around 25Mb, and hadn't increased during the thumbnailing process.
So either Windows was using over (1024-180)Mb, 844Mb of physical RAM, or system monitor is designed to lie about it. What would be the point of doing so? Microsoft don't pretend it'll work with more than 1GB, so why lie that it'll use more than 512Mb? Especially as the "lie" would have begun way back when 64Mb was a huge machine!
Like I said, no fan of Microsoft but I have no reason to doubt the general wisdom on this issue; and I remember a scare story when I built my last machine that nothing above 128Mb (or 64Mb according to some) would be used by Windows. It was.
Now, can anyone help me with this airbrush thing? [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Jax
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Jax,
As you have already found - if you want to change the colour - ensure that the brush is set to enable colour changing - use the brush then change the colour.
If you want to change the colour permanently or in the current document re-create the brush in that document - the brush will then be available in the re-created colour. if you need it in more than one colour there is no reason you cannot make several.
Christine
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You are not alone!
I have exactly the same problem. I find the custom brushes too much of a pain to use because they just don't act like normal brushes. It is not just the colour, you cant draw straight lines using the alt key either.
Maybe xara will address this in the next version?
Huge Regards
Dave
Home sweet home:
Http://www.squeakypics.co.uk
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Jax, I wonder if the name gallery could help. I quess it would depend on what other objects were already in the drawing. The name gallery considers the airbrush line black so if you have other black lines they would also be controlled by the black in the name gallery.
You could put the airbrushing on a different layer (with other layers locked), draw then click on the black in the name gallery, right click on the color you want your airbrush lines to be and it will change them all at once.
I hope that makes sense it is Monday morning after all...and I really have no idea if that would be a viable work around [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Mickie
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Thanks for your answers; you've answered what I was wondering, which was whether the behaviour of my natural brushes is how it should be!
It seems to me an odd choice to make these brushes work the way they do, which would I think be too much of a pain to work with on a regular basis, for me at least. It's no worry really; I've never airbrushed in Corel Xara... it just seemed like something that would be at the least fun and probably pretty useful.
But changing color retrospectively would make airbrushing difficult (trying to gauge how much blue to apply when it's supposed to be red) and creating new brushes all the time seems like way too much of a palaver; I'd want to have my airbrush poised and rapidly just pick a new color from the palette.
So =sigh= I guess I'll be giving the natural brushes a miss (until they sort them out in Xara XI [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] )
Not the end of the world. It's still fab at doing what it's always done, and like I said the Bevel tool is worth the upgrade price by itself!
Many thanks all again,
Jax
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Welcome to the forum.... [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
Not to bring up an old nit pick of mine, I totally abandoned the use of the brushes. I get exception crashes when I use some of them, taking all my work with it.
Can't create a new one, same thing happens, can't even alter one that exist, YUP, same thing happens. So if I occasionally want to add a bubble or chain or something like that I use them, other than that, I can't take the chance of having my work go down that toilet using the troublesome brushes. So I don't.
XaraX more than paid for itself with all the other things it's capable of doing, so it's OK. Maybe next version they will have all this taken care of. I even replaced my video card (Matrox Millennium G550) and NOPE, crash, crash, crash (also have 550 RAM, Pentium III/1Ghz speed) so it's XaraX bug.
By the way, I use Opera 6.0 sometimes but I prefer IE 5.5 over it and I think Netscape sucks BIG TIME!! But that is just MHO. What ever floats your boat then use it, doesn't matter what anyone else thinks you should be using. It's like someone shoving their religion down your throat, I don't dig that kinda stuff!!! When I was using Linux for awhile all anyone could do was bash Microsoft and while I do think they are a bit "evil" (for a lack of a better word) Windows gets the job done. Of course I heard that the new release of the Linux kernel may need some looking into (full USB support, improved support of audio and video cards and camera and tablet support), we shall see [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
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As a newbie to Xara X, I was trying to make the brush for the glass button thread, made several brushes, and ended up crashing Xara every time I tried to edit ANY brush.
Having been trained in programming, I figured it was some incorrect Xara procedure I was doing that was not covered by an error-catching procedure in the code. See the error message below. It crashed Xara every time I tried to Edit a brush.
I deleted the brushes I created, which cleared up the problem, and re-read the Help file on creating brushes. I created a brush and saved it in the Brushes folder, WITHOUT using it on a path(line) first. I quit the application and restarted it. This brush resided in the Brushes folder, but did NOT appear in the Line Gallery, though a folder for it DID appear. It also did not appear in the brushes drop-down box of the Freehand Tool. And it prevented the Editing of any other brush, and crashed Xara every time. It is necessary to use the brush on a line, then save it.
I would like to see a bitmap brush system incorporated into Xara, but would not want the application to get bloated to do that. Bitmap brushes would require the need for "bitmap objects" to paint on, probably transparent square areas.
The current system isn't really "brushes", but placing many vector objects on a path or line.
Dale
Why, I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself, you know...
- Lewis Carroll
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Now I REALLY don't feel so alone thinking it was my system....it seems for some lucky folks they have NO problem using the brushes, editing current brushes or creating new brushes. Then there are a smaller percentile of folks that have "our problem".
I just couldn't grasp why some have this problem and some don't!! While this doesn't solve it, The explanation seems viable.
OH well, maybe next version [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img] But I DO agree on the bloat issue as well.
As it stands I seem to have loaded too many plug-ins for the Bitmap stuff and that slows XaraX loading down to a snails pace, which I don't like, but I use most of those effects so it just needs to be like that.
RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
