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Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
I recently installed the Xara Designer Pro+ trial after researching features in up to 200 different programs over a span of 34 years and am interested in the V20 option. I want a Swiss Arm Knife program that can be used both for my scientific illustrated note taking all the way up to desktop publishing for a book. I think Xara Designer Pro+ was developed with such a thinking in mind which is why I became quite excited about it when for some reason I only came to know of it recently. But so far there are some features I can't find and so they either don't exist or I can't find them even after doing a lot of searching in forums and Xara literature and Help files. I want to take or write notes in this program as it's the only multi page capable program that in the same program can do quality Bezier illustrations, can edit raster images, has text styles, can have objects moving with text, has a small file size, and is reliable. Microsoft OneNote has poor illustration and text flow capability, Adobe Illustrator has 1 page capability and huge file sizes, CorelDRAW or Corel Designer can't have objects move with text, and Samsung Notes doesn't have Bezier curves and can't be used on non Samsung computers. I also would like to do desktop publishing with the program as it would be great to reuse some of the graphics from my notes in the book and Adobe Indesign really only works well with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop and the subscription costs of their programs is very high and the file sizes very large. I studied the history behind the xar file type which seems interesting as theoretically it can be quite compact.
(1) File size: I might make 100,000 separate notes in my lifetime and am looking to make Xara Designer Pro+ into a note taking program which I'm envisioning would be an illustrated multipage capable Zettelkasten system on steroids with each note being a separate file. File size is important then. I noticed in my tests that 1 page or 3,103 characters of text is 35 K (kilobytes) with the Times New Roman 10 pt font but only 12.4 K with 2 pt text. I had an expert look inside the xar file format and it seems there is a large preview bitmap in the file, perhaps it is the 256x256 32 K bitmap that shows up in the sidebar. I can't find any setting to disable it? If it would be disabled there is a chance of 5.8 K with 1 page or 3,103 characters of text which would be the same as the very efficient Samsung Notes file format.
(2) Externally linked images: To do a book of 50-800 pages all the graphic files need to be externally linked, otherwise the program will bog down generally. I can't seem to find a way of externally linking graphic files, does it exist? Perhaps the best question is, what is the maximum practical pages of a Xara Designer Pro+ file with 2 vector illustrations per page?
(3) Equation editor: For scientific and engineering documents, an equation editor is needed, something that is OLE or integral to the program. Xara Designer Pro+ doesn't have it's own equation editor like Corel Designer and I can't figure out a way of doing OLE with MathType, I can only paste it in which can't be edited.
(4) Print on demand book printing: Is the Commercial printing PDF/X 300 dpi images what Amazon print on demand books will accept and is it acceptable quality for color printing?
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
my gut feeling is you are asking too much of the program, but others who know it better may have some methodolgy
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Ben, welcome to TalkGraphics. I like a challenge.
1. There is no large preview image in any Xara design file. There is a 32kB Bitmap in the Bitmap Gallery. This is not used in any design unless you explicitly copy it in. It is in the program, not the design, or on any rendered output. XPro+ rendered page backgrounds use CSS with <span> Tags or SVG fills so anything like this is tens of bytes..
I used the A-4 1-column template with Opens Sans 10pt. I created 6 pages of text (22,000 chars) and the design file was 60kB. Each rendered HTML page was 10kB. I would use multiple paged design files and treat each page as one file equivalent. I'll cover how many pages per design file later on. The overheads of rendering obviously share the other required assets (JS, CSS, WOFF). So if you have 100k files your design files would be 1GB. If you rendered all out to HTML or PDF then another 1GB.
2. It is relative easy to link to external images. You create a Placeholder and make it Repel text under. Then you include an HTML <img> Tag with src to the external file. If you want to see the actual image in the design, you would Re-generate the Placeholder.; an image smaller in size (probably) to the original would appear and become part of the design file size. Unticked, there is no overhead. It depends if you need to see the image in the design or only as rendered. Potentially, you could just drag your image in, apply its Image Filename and , crucially, Optimise Photo. The original is preserved but the design and render are kept at 192/96dpi. External linking to achieve 300dpi is clearly going to be the best for you.
3. I would search out a web widget such as MathJax. You add its code to your design website head and put your editable equation into another Placeholder.
4. PDF/X 300dpi is more than adequate.
For books 50 - 800 pages, I would split into sections/chapters of up to 100 pages. Export as PDF/X and use a utility to merge the sections/chapters into your book. I have handled 500-page designs without images and Xara barely copes. Its newest version may, I have not checked.
If you choose to isolate each file then you loose the power of linkage.
I would chuck/gather themed content into a multi-page design file, where, for little overhead, you can hyperlink easily across pages. With a little effort, your links can cross into other rendered chunks, making a cohesive whole.
An alternative is to change your text files into MarkDown files. You get the benefit of using a plain text editor but display as HTML and print to PDF.
I would use something like GitHub where you can have your own private repository. I use similar but self-hosted with Datenstrom Yellow but your project is probably too big for that.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
...I like a challenge...
rather though you would :D;)
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Ben - Welcome to TalkGraphics
I have been using Xara since 1995. I have also produced over a dozen paperback books, all fiction, using Xara. And I have cursed a blue streak with every book because of simple features that should be part of the app but are not there. But I use Xara because I know it so well and even though there are many key features for DTP missing, I am able to work around the missing features.
Last year, I tried Affinity Publisher to recreate a book I had already produced just to see what the process and experience was. And I have to say, I wish I had used Affinity Publisher a long time ago.
It is created specifically for desk top publishing with sophisticated formatting options, and such simple but essential functions such as Master Pages. It took me a while to get up to speed and I relied heavily on Affinity's support page/community, who were knowledgeable, helpful, and quick to respond. I am pretty sure that most of the advanced features you are asking about are included and arranged in logical groups of related features in Affinity Publisher.
Xara is great for many things, and I use it daily to create and assemble my 3D stereograms. I cannot think how I could ever live without it.
But if you are going to the trouble of learning a new program, investigating Affinity Publisher would be well worth the time invested.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
added advantage of affinity is that, although vector/bitmap/publishing are three seperate programs, they all open each others file types [bit like adobe] so many operations are effectively seamless
I don't really do books, but affinity publisher is what it says on the tin; xara tries to be a bit of everything, and sadly often fails to be
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
There is no large preview image in any Xara design file. There is a 32kB Bitmap in the Bitmap Gallery. This is not used in any design unless you explicitly copy it in. It is in the program, not the design, or on any rendered output. XPro+ rendered page backgrounds use CSS with <span> Tags or SVG fills so anything like this is tens of bytes. I used the A-4 1-column template with Opens Sans 10pt. I created 6 pages of text (22,000 chars) and the design file was 60kB.
The expert on file formats sent me a breakdown of a 5 character text document I created in Xara Designer Pro (see below attachment). The Total size of the file was 10,200 bytes (10.2 K) and looking inside there is a 6,497 byte (6.497 K) jpeg in it. Doing some of my own forensics, I found this file is not used by Windows 10 Taskbar preview, and it is not used by Xara Designer Pro Page and Layer Gallery, it is however used in Windows Explorer Preview Pane. While Microsoft Word documents are actually rendered from the file in Windows Explorer and you can scroll through all the pages, there is no such rendering available for Xara files and so guess the choice was the single jpeg preview bitmap per document.
By creating some files I came to the following conclusion. A xar file of a single US letter size document contains about 3.9 K page setup section, then a single color jpeg preview image averaging 44 K, then about 1.0 K for the actual text for a total of 48.9 K for the total file. So for a typical 1 page text document with 10 pt Open Sans text filling the whole page the text takes up about 2.08% of the total file. For a 12 page document the ratio is much better and the text now takes up 20% of the total file size.
Regarding the text in a xar file, it appears to be highly compressed, the 1 page of average 10 pt Open Sans text is 3,100 characters and Windows Notepad would save this as a 3.100 K file, so the text in xar files is compressed by a ratio of 3.103 times which is quite good for text.
I also did some tests with a complex vector letterhead which saved in Adobe Illustrator without compression at 1,000 K (1 Mb). I embedded this in a Xara Designer Pro document and came to the conclusion that the image only took 10.0 K which is 1% of the size of the Illustrator file, this is the same size of a svgz file which is the most compact file type in existence in my opinion but is not supported natively by many programs.
I'm very pleased with the small file space that text and vector graphics take in the xar file but was hoping that the preview jpeg image could be turned off for short documents? After more experiments I haven't found a way. Can it be turned off?
Attachment 134633
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Thank you for the analysis.
There are two aspects you can look into.
The first may be to create your own Template. When saving you can untick Show preview.
The second to to see if you can access the Xara .WIX format and export your page to that, deleting the original. When saving, you can exclude the Preview image. For me, a single character A4 file is 2,696B.
You originally mentioned the image file size was 32kB. You now are reporting TAG_PREVIEWBITMAP_JPEG with 6,497B.
At no point can I hit 49kB.
All this tells me is you should not be saving design files with only one page of text.
Offer up a 'page' from your website that we can dissect to see how well we can do.
Storage is cheap and single paging everything is not efficient for search and retrieval.
With a MarkDown system, I am able to render as HTML and directly edit the page contents through that render with none of the Xara 'overheads'.
It comes with a built-in search mechanism and is older than three years.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
@Ben Wiens - your attachment in post #8 is invalid - have you deleted it ?
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
handrawn
@Ben Wiens - your attachment in post #8 is invalid - have you deleted it ?
You can save it as a TXT file though.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
is that a mod thing, I can't see how to do it...
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
handrawn
is that a mod thing, I can't see how to do it...
Yes, it appears to be. You probably got "Invalid Attachment specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator".
The content is:
Quote:
XARARECS.BAS - Records in XARA file TEST5CHR.XAR:
FilePosn TagHex TagDec DataSize Tag Description
00000000 File ID = 0x41524158, 0x0A0DA3A3
00000008 00000002 2 63 TAG_FILEHEADER
0000004F 0000003E 62 6497 TAG_PREVIEWBITMAP_JPEG
000019B8 00000028 40 0 TAG_DOCUMENT
000019C0 00000001 1 0 TAG_DOWN
000019C8 00001028 4136 12 TAG_DOCUMENTINFORMATION
000019DC 00001175 4469 12 (new?)
000019F0 0000000C 12 142 TAG_TAGDESCRIPTION
00001A86 00001012 4114 4 TAG_DOCUMENTNUDGE
00001A92 00001191 4497 8 (new?)
00001AA2 00001014 4116 5 TAG_DOCUMENTBITMAPSMOOTHING
00001AAF 0000101C 4124 8 TAG_DUPLICATIONOFFSET
00001ABF 00001079 4217 0 (new?)
00001AC7 00001147 4423 10 (new?)
00001AD9 000011B3 4531 14 (new?)
00001AEF 000011B8 4536 2 (new?)
00001AF9 000011E8 4584 8 (new?)
00001B09 00001197 4503 8 (new?)
00001B19 0000119A 4506 8 (new?)
00001B29 000011AD 4525 4 (new?)
00001B35 000011B9 4537 20 (new?)
00001B51 00001220 4640 0 (new?)
00001B59 0000125C 4700 0 (new?)
00001B61 0000005D 93 4 TAG_DOCUMENTFLAGS
00001B6D 00001213 4627 540 (new?)
00001D91 0000001E 30 4 TAG_STARTCOMPRESSION
(ZLib compressed data, etc.)
0000286A 00000003 3 0 TAG_ENDOFFILE
I have delved further into Xara's manifest and found the Default image is in XaraXEng.dll >Bitmap 30464 : 2057.
Perhaps @Ben could try replacing that with a 2-colour 16x16px Black image instead; that is all of 32B.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
yes, that is what I got; thanks
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
@Ben - quiet your end.
I have mentioned MarkDown several times.
The product that is near perfect for your needs is Obsidian.
It is multi-platform/OS but all local storage, hence private.
All your notes would be in MarkDown and are editable, searchable, and copies are saved and stored under your control.
No overhead and external image files are just linked in.
It comes with Core Plugins for Search and Templates.
Community Plugins for LaTeX, Longform for book management.
Quote:
the Pandoc Plugin allows you to export documents to Word Documents, PDFs, ePub books, HTML, PowerPoint and LaTeX among (many) others
It's so good, I would use it myself. Oh! I do.
It's free. You can pay for Sync & Publish, each @$8/m.
For you, my doubt is your older OSs.
Acorn
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1 Attachment(s)
Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Offer up a 'page' from your website that we can dissect to see how well we can do.
1. I've created a sample file in xra format, which I extracted from my website, for anyone to play with, I get 122.1 K for a full 2 page document with a complex vector header, this xra file likely has 3.9 K page setup section, 2.0 K of text, 10 K vector header, and 106.2 K preview jpeg. It would be great to eliminate the preview jpeg and this would bring the file size down to about 15.9 K (unless the vector embedding adds overhead).
2. I created a template which had the create preview image unchecked and this did not reduce the filesize of 1 page of text, the preview image was still there and visible in Windows Explorer.
3. Acorn, I am getting a new Windows 11 computer, really, and have been waiting for the right parts to become available for a year already. Along with it some upgraded programs, the reason for this trial. But was still hoping to install some newer programs on a Windows 7 machine and the reason for those questions.
4. Acorn, I was an early adopter of Windows 10, installed it on my main computer soon after it came out on the recommendation of Microsoft and shortly after bought a Nokia Windows smartphone, which was a great smartphone, drank in the Microsoft Windows 10 on all devices cool aid and looked forward to a bright future with Windows 10 forever. My computer was only about 3 years old then and had shipped with Windows 7. This was a horrible mistake to upgrade it and after tearing my hair out for 2 years, Microsoft technical experts told me it had been a mistake to suggest the upgrade because my 3 year old Intel i7 Quad processor was not compatible. It also seemed like due to me being an early adopter of Windows 10, Microsoft more than likely used my laptop as one of many remote servers to disseminate Windows 10 to the world. The router I was using reported a huge spike in Internet traffic during this period. Poor laptop, it wasn't made for this kind of punishment. I went back to Windows 7 then and realize I liked it so much better.
5. The expert I used to look inside the xar file format would like to know if an updated xar format specification is available. See http://site.xara.com/support/docs/webformat/spec/ for the only one we can find which was lasted updated on 2007Sep14. Key questions, does xra file format now use the UCS-2, UTF-16, or UTF-16 text encoding.
6. Acorn, regarding Obsidian. I have looked into about 100 of these note taking programs in the last months and couldn't find anything I liked, always something major missing. According to Wikipedia, "Obsidian operates on a folder of text documents; each new note in Obsidian generates a new text document". I understand that add-ons such as ExcaliDraw are available, but doesn't this just result in a mixture of Obsidian main notes being pure text and ExcaliDraw creating entirely doodles in a separate image file, rather than a mix of vector, raster, and text in a note like could be done in Xara Designer Pro? My idea of a perfect modern Zellelkasten note taking system is to have longer notes of sometimes a few pages (even you suggested that) similar to how students take multi page notes in class. I might have one note for a project that I'm working on and add to it for months or even years which would become pages long. But I want the drawings to be higher quality than doodles by using Bezier curves, and located between section of typed text and have proper tables and equations. This is the concept of "visual note taking" which is more desirable than text only note taking but the ideal is to have graphics and typed text all together with the graphics mostly anchored to the text. Besides Xara Designer Pro, I have yet to find a program that does such a thing as for example Corel Designer does not anchor objects with text, Microsoft OneNote, Samsung Notes do not have editable Bezier vector drawings, Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer do not have multiple page capability, and Adobe Indesign is way too clumsy to use for note taking and has huge file sizes.
Attachment 134640
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8 Attachment(s)
Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
@Ben, thank you for the sample file. It clocks in at 119.3kB
I have to assume that the untick of the Preview in the Save Template dialog is where you ought to be able to remove the Preview image.
It appears not to work in XPro+ so I believe it has to be a Bug.
I will leave you to tackle Xara with this as you have more skin in the game. There may be other associated issues that you should raise at the same time.
Your original numbered bullets (1} to (4), I think, are now answered, if not fully addressed:
(1) File Size.
To 'remove' the Preview image, my current fix is to create a very short first page that is blank. I estimate the Preview file is ~4kB.
You may wish to experiment with making the first page 0.5in x 0.5in to reduce this to near nothing. I'll leave the analysis to you and your expert. I find my poodle's eyes cross when he has to do sums.
You should lose the Scale to fit width setting else your HTML render will scale the view setting to fit your browser.
As a design approach, I have placed a Title & Revision section into the MouseOver layer so that the Preview image is monochromatic (here, white). You could colour code your Notes if you wanted.
The first page filename is a mix of abbreviated Title and Revision Date.
I set up an altered Template (Attachment 134644) for this. It is 7.33kB. You need to accept this as your overhead.
Should you export this as PDF (enabled with Web Properties > Export > Viewer options > PDF download then the output file size is 5.42kB - Attachment 134650
I took your XAR file and added it into my new Template and got this: Attachment 134645, it is now 38kB with PDF 25.9kB - Attachment 134651
The greater reduction is where I applied your (2) ask.
(2) Externally linked images.
I took your header group and exported it as an SVG - Attachment 134646.
I immediately linked to it in its external location, saving 77.8kB of internal file storage.
I also make it Repeat on all note pages as well as make it Repel text under.
This replaces it: <img class="xr_ap" src="revision-yyyymondd_html_files/BWTG.svg" alt="" title="" style="left:0px;top:17px;width:816px;height:76px;" >; just over 128B per reference.
The benefit is you can preserve all your 300+dpi images in their own repository and reference to them for any of your Notes.
For your book, where the images are pure vector, they will be stored in Xara's compressed FLARETEXT format. I would not outload such items.
In passing, there has been no public update of the XAR Format Document that I have seen.
I would also assume UTF-8: <meta charset="utf-8">, probably around the time the applications went 64-bit. It is also probably USC-2.
(3) Equation editor.
Is possible with the right product.
(4) Book size.
I would simply append your collated Notes into one long XAR (100+ pages) and export as PDF.
If your images are externally-linked and in-line diagrams are vector, there will be no quality issues and no in-depth editing needed.
(*) Obsidian.
The MarkDown equivalent file is 8.16kB with links to the above SVG: Attachment 134647 - replace .txt with .md (a TG restriction).
I would use Xara exclusively for diagrams and export each as SVG into the same folder as the Notes so linkage is just ![[BWTG.svg]] and is "anchored".
they could be in their own location and externally-link as well but keeping one Obsidian Vault for Notes and diagrams does all the heavy lifting.
Add a few hundred Notes and images and then you see the power of Obsidian's Graph view:
Attachment 134648
Not to mention Search:
Attachment 134649
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
gwpriester
Last year, I tried Affinity Publisher to recreate a book I had already produced just to see what the process and experience was. And I have to say, I wish I had used Affinity Publisher a long time ago.
Thanks for the suggestion. Affinity was on my list of programs to look into but somehow I had not researched it very well because Affinity Designer doesn't have multiple page capability and hasn't been in the market for a long time and might not be very popular and lasting. My ideal program would be a program that can do note taking as well as books.
Then handrawn mentioned that each of the Affinity programs open each other's files types and this seemed interesting. In the last few days I've researched the Serif company and the Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo and it opened up my eyes. These programs have become very popular with 3,000,000 users of at least one of the modules. And version 2 has added some more features and now it has all the book features I would need.
The fact that Designer and Photo can work in Publisher could save a lot of time in writing an illustrated book and the fact that Designer doesn't have multiple page capability might not be an issue at all if I do the notes in Publisher rather. So for books, Affinity Publisher is a winner in my mind, for the note taking it depends on the minimum file size of the documents. Adobe Indesign minimum file size is 144 K with as many things turned off as possible which is too big for note taking.
So I plan on downloading the Affinity Suite tomorrow. Not only is Affinity Suite way cheaper than Adobe Creative Cloud but it might be way faster to work with. Crossing my fingers that Affinity Suite is the Swiss Army knife program that I've been looking for. Version 2 likely doesn't run on Windows 7 and guess there is no way of buying Version 2 and also getting Version 1 which I think can run on Window 7?
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Version 1 is no longer available; also it is not so easy to transfer an affinity licence unless the seller is willing to give over the email address as well, because to quote affinity 'one is encoded in the other' [and you would also likely need their permission so to transfer]
but if you could get it, it should run on windows 7 service pack 1 or later
you only pay once for affinity per version - ie: once for ver1 and then for upgrade to ver2; will be same for version 3; meanwhile all the updates one bug fixes are free; no subscription
xara users should be so lucky, though of course, affinity does not do web-design...
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
So then Ben, I wish you well with Affinity.
You originally specified "File size is important then" with "all the graphic files need to be externally linked".
Your 737 MAX file with only text is 132kB and its PDF is 415.42kB for all of two and a half pages.
Affinity offers little in the way of embedding external content.
The switching back and forth with Affinity is on a page-by-page basis.
You also said you were "an early adopter of Windows 10" and getting W11 but here you are now asking about W7.
Xara Pro+ will do what you want with a first page preview image overhead that I have reduced dramatically for you. Xara could probably eliminate this totally if you advised them of the issue.
Xara comes with the joy of in-line graphic and vector manipulation alongside text.
The trade-off is around 10kB per page of text that is a factor of three above raw ASCII.
Both Affinity and Xara use proprietary file structures so if the product breaks or disappears so does your archive or book.
On the other hand, MarkDown is plain ASCII that is parity with plain text.
It is human-readble and there are many applications that will handle .md files.
External image linking is trivial and goes where you put it.
Your only loss is in-line vector creation.
If I did not have XPro+, I would exclusively use Boxy SVG as I can deliver SVG animations and retain the same SVG for re-editing.
The SVG code will paste directly although is is better to use an image link; Obsidian allows drag and drop into any document file as will any other good MarkDown editor.
I will not trivialise the task you have set yourself but you are juggling with system and archive instability without addressing your computers first and then how to handle all the metadata around achieving a fully integrated and searchable archive.
For almost in-line LaTeX in an .md file you could use add a <script> line: <script src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML"> </script>and thereafter surround LaTeX with $$: $$V_{sphere} = \frac{4}{3}\pi r^3$$. This also works in XPro+ but the text needs to be turned into a Named htmlblocktext area.
Obsidian + Boxy SVG >> Xara Designer Pro >> Affinity Suite.
I think you would be better with a purchase (https://www.xara.com/webdesigner/v20/) rather than a subscription.
Acorn
P.S. I would have liked some sort of acknowledgement for the effort put into Post#17.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
gwpriester
+1
Another +1 for Affinity publisher. Xara is Swiss army, but Affinity is the tool for this job.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
So then Ben, I wish you well with Affinity.
You originally specified "File size is important then" with "all the graphic files need to be externally linked".
Your 737 MAX file with only text is 132kB and its PDF is 415.42kB for all of two and a half pages.
Affinity offers little in the way of embedding external content.
The switching back and forth with Affinity is on a page-by-page basis.
...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
bwood
Another +1 for Affinity publisher. Xara is Swiss army, but Affinity is the tool for this job.
Bill, going back to the OP's initial ask, I would have to disagree.
It would be fine for a book's production but not for the preceding note taking. It doesn't readily handle external images either.
How can you easily manage 100,000 notes without some retrieval system? Remember too that both Affinity and Xara are using proprietary file structures.
Anyhow the OP seems to have set his path to Affinity.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
... It (Affinity Publisher) doesn't readily handle external images either. ...
Images can be linked versus embedded. It's kinda the default when placing images, at least once the Prefer Linked policy is set. Unless you mean something else.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
mwenz
Images can be linked versus embedded. It's kinda the default when placing images, at least once the Prefer Linked policy is set. Unless you mean something else.
Mike, linked is what I wanted to discover was possible. Thank you.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Bill, going back to the OP's initial ask, I would have to disagree.
It would be fine for a book's production but not for the preceding note taking. It doesn't readily handle external images either.
How can you easily manage 100,000 notes without some retrieval system? Remember too that both Affinity and Xara are using proprietary file structures.
Anyhow the OP seems to have set his path to Affinity.
Acorn
Point taken Acorn. I joined the party late. Many thanks for the heads up on obsidian. Love it. Beats sticky notes and notepad.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Both Affinity and Xara use proprietary file structures so if the product breaks or disappears so does your archive or book. On the other hand, MarkDown is plain ASCII that is parity with plain text. It is human-readble and there are many applications that will handle .md files. External image linking is trivial and goes where you put it. Your only loss is in-line vector creation.
Thanks
Thanks Acorn for all the work in the analysis of my note taking and book publishing issues. I have only now come back to the Xara Forum after having to focus on trying the Affinity Suite for 7 days before the trial period ran out plus additional days in researching note taking issues.
Decided on Microsoft Access database plus links
It was actually only today that I made up my mind to go with a variation of what you recommended, Acorn. I plan on continuing to use my Microsoft Access database which will have basically an abstract text version of what the note is about, then each record will have several hyperlink fields to link to either external Internet or internal data on my computer. So this way I can link to pretty much anything, CAD files, pdf, docx, png, svg, indd, afpub created by a variety of programs. The plan is to purchase a licence for Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo as my new program for creating most of the more complex documents that have a mixture of text, illustrations, images including my book.
Zara Designer Pro+ vs Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo
Both Zara Designer Pro+ and Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo are very interesting programs, interestingly both from the UK, both with very small file sizes, both Swiss Army knife type programs. I'm sick of the expensive American bloatware, so my prediction is more good things are going to come from Europe in the next years. The Xara files are even more highly compressed than Affinity. It appears however that Sarif has put a lot more time and money into their Affinity suite than Xara has with Xara Designer Pro+ in the last years. In my case I want the book writing features of Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo.
Microsoft Access database
I actually have been using an electronic Zettelkasten type note taking system for about 32 years already, I developed it myself using the Microsoft Access database when that first came out and presently holds about 50,000 individual notes. It's plain text but of course buried in a binary file. I back these up to a different filenames periodically in case of database corruption. The advantage of the Microsoft Access database is that I can add features as I like. I also developed my corporate accounting system using it and is more flexible than commercial accounting programs. My Microsoft Access note taking system is actually several different files each focusing on a different theme, book notes, general notes, Internet links, diary because they are arranged in different ways. I can search for keywords in about 1/10 of a second and this creates a list all the records line by line that have a certain keyword in them. That's great and I would hate to give up on that. While graphics could be linked into the database, it's not easily editable graphics and not multiple graphics in a document format I'm looking for. Having no inline graphics is a real disadvantage in my work and really limits the usefulness of the notes. As I said in an earlier message, I've been wrestling with documents that support graphics properly now for 34 years. I looked into Obsidian and also the other 100 note taking programs and also Schrivener for book writing. It's the same old problem, no good quality editable inline graphics. I hear you, Acorn, that text will be around for a longer time than specialty file formats. But I simply don't want to create an all text document with linked external graphics, they need to be part of the same document, in the same way that I would hand write the notes and drawings in pencil. So the solution is to link to an actual proper document like Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo document which has a mixture of text, illustration, and images.
Windows 7 and XP Mode
Using Windows 7 is key to accessing archived information which often means running programs that will not run in the newer operating system. Windows 7 in this regard is a joy to use with it's highly integrated XP Mode. I keep using it because what is the alternative for running older software and accessing older files that might have important information. This has to do with archival which you mentioned earlier. Windows 10 or 11 doesn't come with an integrated XP Mode, it does have the Hyper V virtual machine, but will Microsoft sell me Windows XP and Windows 7 operating systems along with the activation keys to go with that? No. And a lot of older programs won't work in compatibility mode. If Microsoft was truly interested in keeping computers safe they would be selling a version of Windows 11 that had XP and Windows 7 Mode also built in with Internet access disabled. I never connect XP Mode to the Internet so there is little chance of a virus or hacker creeping in through that operating system. Because of this dilemma, I completely rebuilt my Toshiba Qosmio X500, which has 2 HDD and an 18.6 inch true high definition screen, just months ago with an identical replacement motherboard from the US and a graphics card from China and so would like to continue using it. And so it would also be great if Xara and Serif allowed us to also download the previous versions that ran under Windows 7 along with the newer Windows 11 versions with a purchase so we can straddle the new and old hardware.
File size comparison for different programs
Below are the results of tests on minimum file sizes for different documents. Smallest Microsoft Word docx files are 12 K, Adobe Indesign 144 K, Affinity Publisher 10 K, and Xara Publisher Pro+ 4 K with the preview stripped out (simulating if unchecking preview image worked). So Adobe Indesign documents are not typically going to be used in any corporate or home office for small items because of their large file sizes. The advantage of both Xara and Affinity programs is that the file sizes are small enough they can be used in place of Microsoft Word which we all know handles complex graphics so poorly. Affinity Publisher is a pretty good program because in my opinion it could be used for any kind of written documents, notes, research documents, letters, booklets, brochures, and books.
Microsoft Word 2016, 12 K
Xara Designer Pro+, 4 K with jpeg thumbnail/preview stripped out of file
Xara Designer Pro+, 11 K with jpeg thumbnail/preview
Affinity Publisher, 10 K, no thumbnail on save
Affinity Designer, 9K, no thumbnail on save
Affinity Photo, 8K no thumbnail on save, 22x20 mm image
Adobe Indesign, 144 K, compression, no ICC, no pdf editing
Adobe Illustrator, 273 K, compression, no ICC, no pdf editing
Adobe Photoshop, 685 K, 22x20 mm image, CMYK, 8 bit
Searching for text in documents
There is no point in making notes unless you can find them. One of the main reasons for going with Microsoft Access database as an index for my documents is that it is difficult to search inside multiple documents on the hard drive. In Windows you can use the findstr command to search inside documents that contain text without opening them. But Microsoft Word 2016, Xara Publisher Pro+, and Affinity Publisher files are all compressed file formats and so here is no text to search. Another method is to use the Windows Explorer preview to see what is inside the files, but while Microsoft Word, Wordpad, and Notepad all have proper multiple page previewers, both Xara Publisher Pro+ and Affinity Publisher only show a thumbnail preview which can't really be read. Ideally the Microsoft Access database would have an afpub previewer built into the note boxes instead of plain text, then I could have what I really want. Microsoft Word fully supports Windows Explorer tags but so far this doesn't seem to be the case for Xara Publisher Pro+ and Affinity Publisher. It appears that note taking programs are mostly designed around having all the notes in a single file just like I have in the Microsoft Access database, this way a search can be done quickly on the entire collection of notes which is pretty great.
Paper based Zettelkasten vs Digital notes
The original Zettelkasten system used a unique file name for each card, and there were index cards dividing major sections of the notes. So my Microsoft Access database you could say is those index cards. My plan is for the documents to be on average a lot longer than the traditional Zettelkasten type notes, might be up to 500 pages long in the case of pdf books, so searching will be two steps, search database, search document. My database does use linked subForms so I can list multiple excerpts from long documents in separate records. A search on the Internet reveals that many people are starting to combine their notes into long documents, this is in a way not the way of the original Zettelkasten system of one file card for one thought but it is much easier to work on and find fewer longer documents. In my work, writing out one single sentence quotation or thought per note is not ideal as I want the complete document to provide background for that thought. So my database with subForms I think is the best of both worlds. Longer notes means less database index entries and this saves time.
File naming system
So the ideal file naming system for notes would be to have a unique filename for each note entry so that they could be moved to a temporary directory for writing a book and them moved back later. I plan on using the Camel Mode file naming system in the future with no spaces, for example 2024Mar20XaraAffinityForum.txt.
Conclusion
Zara Designer Pro+ and Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo both are in an ideal spot to take major market share from Microsoft Word, Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and CorelDraw and become dominant. At this point Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo is the leader. Time to say goodbye to Microsoft Word with it's poor illustration support. Time to say goodbye to Adobe because of huge file sizes and expensive subscriptions. Time to say goodbye to CorelDraw because they have no desktop publishing program, Ventura Publisher was dropped years ago. Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo could be used for any kind of written documents, notes, research documents, letters, booklets, brochures, and books. What could make it even better is a proper Windows Explorer preview and tagging.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Xara, the software company, is spelled with an X
Zara, spelled with a Z , make clothes and are a totally different company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zara
they are not interchangeable, and yes it does matter when posting online
;)
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Ben, thank you for the detailed insights into your logic.
I wish you well with Serif's Affinity suite. Having reasonable understood your objective, I would never have chosen Serif or Xara as a repository.
Your MSA database is an abstract and keyword indexer that leads to a two-step search for a phrase in an actual document.
It does provide a form of digital asset management (DAM) that allows you to link in external assets. By external, I include local filestore as well as Internet.
I would actually develop your Zettelkasten system slightly. Change the date to yyyymmdd. This immediately affords a date order in MS Windows. The ddd abbreviated Month forces an alphanumeric sort that jumbles the months.
CamelCase is good but I would go a step further and include some keywords into the filename. MS W7 accommodates 260 bytes for the full path length. W10 NTFS can be as much as 32,767 bytes.
yyyymmdd-ThisIsAnExceedinglylongFileName-Keyword1-Keyword2-Keyword3.txt
Using this approach, I can use 'Everything' to quickly locate a filename through fragments of words: 'his ord2 word3' catches the above filename and highlight the found fragments in no time: I have 3M files stored locally and I can type in 202403 as fast as I can and I get 604 hits.
Using Obsidian, which comes with its own Search engine, the retrieval is more sedate (way faster than MS Windows), but here, you are searching all content and filenames.
Saving a Search as a Bookmark returns results extremely fast.
Archival storage under W7 is your main problem. At some time your W7 machines will die and your archive and legacy programs will disappear.
I took your https://www.benwiens.com/transportation2.html page and quickly converted it to MarkDown for use in Obsidian.
I renamed it 20230305-UrbanTravelIssues.md.
I added in the keywords as Tags.
I added in all the associated images as adjunct files.
===
I searched for a range of terms and all worked perfectly.
I opened up the Links window and picking any of the images, I could fire it up into its native editor, alter and save it and it immediately updated the principal document.
So provided you have a text editor and a image editor, you could even throw away Obsidian & MSA and still future-proof your active and legacy documentation.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
So provided you have a text editor and a image editor, you could even throw away Obsidian & MSA and still future-proof your active and legacy documentation.
Simplest idea is to just use the image editor
Many image editors can create text, vector, and raster image combinations. For example Adobe Indesign/Illustrator/Photoshop, Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo, CorelDraw, and Xara Designer Pro+ all can do these 3 things really well. If an editor suite exists that can do all these three things, why not choose this editor suite because that way all the work can be done in a single editor suite? This was my original idea till I found out that Affinity files are compressed and text cannot easily be searched for in them directly like with plain text, there was no proper preview, and tags might not be visible in Windows Explorer. That's the reason for using the Microsoft Access index for now. But regarding the big picture, hopefully Sarif will create the equivalent of the Adobe Bridge for the Affinity Suite which could do batch decompression and searching for text plus hopefully have a true file previewer, and utilize the file tags. Adobe Bridge is really a type of Zettelkasten indexing system.
Future proofing
Your idea of future proofing is to have as much information in plain text and as little as possible in image format because text is more standardized and imaged formats are not. My idea is to have as much information in image format and as little as possible in text because pictures are worth a thousand words. Ideally I want the images and text to be all mixed up together. It's the modern way. In the old days the pictures and charts were at the end of the book but now they are alongside the text which is easier to read but this is only possible with the new desktop publishing programs. How do I make notes on which new computer to buy, I create a research report for that. Myself and people in companies are not just using these programs for taking notes like in a classroom or for the grocery list or quick ideas but many of the notes also are converted over time into reports for others to read and should be formatted properly with equation, tables, charts, illustrations, pictures, and should be able to be outputted in Adobe Acrobat format as a single file or printed. Adobe really figured this out at the beginning with the Creative Suite, that the future of all kinds of document creation should be with a suite of high end programs that all work together seamlessly. Sarif is smart and has just recently bought big time into this important concept as well with a suite of high end Affinity programs. How do you print out a report with a Word document and Adobe Illustrator illustrations? You don't, it doesn't work. How about Obsidian text and Affinity Designer illustration? It's not workable. It has to be a suite of programs. This is the future. Is this new concept future proofed? Not entirely, it's all about the converters and always has been. It keeps companies like Markzware in business.
The main problem
The main problem for my work is that programmers that work on retail type programs focus more on text than illustrations or images. Maybe most programmers actually hate graphics, this seems to be the case at Microsoft. What is called plain text still has to be encoded in some binary format just like illustrations though. The modern ASCII format dates back to 1961 but before than it was IBMs EBCDIC, and since around 1992 Unicode has become more popular. The only reason we can somehow live with these different text formats is that converters are common and most people stick with a single current standard. Next in line are the raster images, many have been around for a long time and converters are also common. If vector illustrations were considered equally important to text then illustration formats would be more standardized and converters more robust. Many years ago when computer aided drawing started being used in large companies, the US Military insisted that a single computer aided design drawing file format be used in the US, that this would be essential in time of war when work would be farmed out to various companies, the compromise was the dxf exchange format.
Which came first, CAD or word processing?
Computer aided design came before word processing. In early 1962, Itek began actively marketing the EDM computer aided design system and General Motors was rasterizing paper drawings already in 1957. It was years later in 1969 that IBM introduced their Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter and Magcard based word processing system. In the corporate world, more money is spend on individual drawing programs than with desktop word processing and desktop publishing programs.
Breaking the bonds of plain text
My project to find the ideal system for all types of documents is not only for myself. I'm a futurist. Our world presently lives in the unfortunate grip of the text based documents. It makes our whole world inefficient and drab. Microsoft Word handles complex text formatting, illustrations, and pictures so badly that people just leave out that. Unfortunately, Word has become the standard word processor in the world. Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop are way too expensive for most people and companies and the file sizes are huge for no apparent reason. CorelDraw is a a nice drawing program but where can you use these, they disbanded Ventura Publisher years ago so these drawings have no home in a document. Xara Designer Pro+ almost is there as a universal document format but it's not for books or complex illustrations or image editing and so could get run over. Inkscape uses the open source svg file format which can also handle a mixture of text, vector, and raster images but has never been made into a full featured program suite. But the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo suite can be used for almost any kind of document, from plain to very complex, it's main limitation now is automation plug ins which is being worked on. So my hope is that this Affinity program suite becomes wildly popular and this new file format turns into a standard just like docx or plain text and pushes out most of the other document file formats. It's a cruel way but that is free enterprise. In the end Microsoft allows others to use the docx format and Adobe allows others to use the pdf format, and Xara published their document specifications, so I'm hoping this or a licensing system will happen with Affinity. Both Microsoft and Adobe are still strong in spite of this but it's always a risk.
Conclusion
The big picture is that the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo suite is marketed mostly for desktop publishing but is perfect for almost any type of document creation including notes, research reports, letters, illustrations, images, user manuals, and books. It's file size is small and suitable for the smallest of notes. If Affinity creates an Affinity Bridge, then this suite will be totally suitable for managing large collections of files.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Ben, thank you for the history. I have survived most of it myself.
You seem to have thrown away the synergy of hyperlinking across multiple documents.
With Affinity, you will need to 'publish' every document and then work out what its link path will be.
Both Xara and Serif (noting your typo) handle internal links adequately but external ones require a collection area (c.f., the Internet).
With Obsidian (and MarkDown) the connectivity is down to the folder location (even across Vaults).
Using images and PDFs squander their information value. Most file formats wither. .txt (a.k.a., .md), UTF-8 et al, ASCII & extended and system flavours of EBCDIC all have simple (Regex) convertors, which I have had to use all of my career(s). Anything proprietary and you are out of the picture.
You were rather emphatic that your images were in an external file store.
In Obsidian, I can quickly link to any image with ![[...]]. If it is a mix of text, vector and graphic then I can link to its .XAR (or other file extension with [File](file:///I:\TG\2023.xar), edit that and export it as an image back to the required location.
Why stop at pictures?
With Boxy SVG, which I use, I can add in images, vectors, text and animate them.
The SVG format payload is quite light too and readily embedded into a MarkDown file.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
You seem to have thrown away the synergy of hyperlinking across multiple documents. With Affinity, you will need to 'publish' every document and then work out what its link path will be. Both Xara and Serif (noting your typo) handle internal links adequately but external ones require a collection area (c.f., the Internet). With Obsidian (and MarkDown) the connectivity is down to the folder location (even across Vaults).
Text based vs binary formatting
Looking at history, there seems to have been two streams of formatting for output, either for the screen, or for printing, on computers. MarkDown is similar to html and Wikitext coding. Back in 1981 one of my brothers published his book "How To Design Your Very Own Solar Home" on a 6809 Southwest Technical Products computer using Flex and a type of crude desktop publishing program similar to NROFF which used text coding because people didn't even have monitors then and the only input was a keyboard. But I was not exposed to this at all having got my first computer in 1990 when all the programs I had like AutoCAD, Word, Microsoft Access, CorelDRAW, and Ventura Publisher were now completely binary. So I'm guessing that still, high level document workflows like desktop publishing and Computer Aided Design are binary so only using text based formatting for all work flows is not practical.
What are notes going to be used for?
I think the bigger question is, what do I and other people want to collect notes for? Just for knowledge? The original goal of the Zettelkasten note taking system was to collect information for writing reports, papers, books, public speaking, and movies. In the field of computer aided drawing, blocks are created which are common items that can be inserted into drawings to save time. These blocks need to be created in the same computer format as the main drawing so they are compatible. So I think the same rational could be used when deciding which program to use for creating notes. I want to create notes in a program that uses the same file formats as I will use in the final publication.
The reason for program suites
The Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo program suite is a great program for publishing a book in, is low cost, is considered very user friendly, and has small file sizes. Program suites were developed because that is the only way to ensure compatibility of three different file types. Can I use the Affinity Designer, Photo files in Obsidian? No. Can I use the svg and png files that are used on Obsidian in Affinity Publisher? Not really. So in my note taking I want to collect files that I can use directly in Affinity Publisher. So it makes sense to use Affinity Publisher for notes, letters, reports, user manuals, papers, pamphlets, and books. I save time only learning one program instead of many and save time by recycling material in the same format.
A super digital Zettelkasten system
In the original Zettelkasten system, there were three work flows. (1) Taking notes on the cards. (2) Typing the book draft from information on the cards. (3) Typesetting the book. In the super digital Zettelkasten system we create the pieces for the book digitally in the notes over time, then combine them together into letters, reports, user manuals, papers, pamphlets, and books without having to retype or recreate a lot of the text and images by using the same program. My training is in manufacturing engineering and this sounds like an efficient work flow. I think this is even more integration of work flows than Sarif even dreamed of when they decided to create the Affinity suite or than generally happens in the industry. In fact experts keep telling me that there should be more steps. But why? I think in the traditional publishing industry there is a great division of labor and many people are involved each doing a small part but this was the way letters were written in companies many years ago with many people involved in writing a single letter, now the executives just do it all themselves on a computer.
New Steps
In the fascinating 1992 Australian movie "Strictly Ballroom" there are those who want to do the "New Steps" while the traditionalist wanted to do the "Accepted Steps" But New Steps are only good if they make sense. So what do you think, do these "New Steps" make sense? Does using a desktop publishing program for notes lack some features of established note taking systems? Yes? But they could be added.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Ben, I am finding you are rather quick in conflating concepts.
MarkDown and WikiText are out of the same stable and a far cry from HTML. A wiki link [[...]] differs from an HTML hyperlink as it will create a placemarker for you to go back at any time and fill in the dots. In HTML, you would get a file not found or similar (404 error). MarkDown is human-readable, not binary, so with nothing other than its printout or a simple text editor, you could make sense of it. In comparison, HTML has a lot of scaffolding and requires a browser (viewer) to understand it more clearly. HTML has its own syntax and so a browser is not always an editor. Yes you can use a text editor but it is onerous.
Wikis are content management systems whereas MarkDown is focused on the content and HTML is a high mix of semantics and syntax, usually swamping content. MarkDown is the closest to pure text with a lighter sprinkling of syntax that allows easy conversion to HTML, allowing for all the formatting and styling without the need to learn a language or use a specialist tool.
You mention three file types. I can only guess these are text, raster and vector.
SVG is a file format that handles and edits text and vector and manipulates raster to a limited extent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ben Wiens
Program suites were developed because that is the only way to ensure compatibility of three different file types.
Can I use the Affinity Designer, Photo files in Obsidian? No.
Can I use the svg and png files that are used on Obsidian in Affinity Publisher? Not really.
Program suites use concepts like object linking and embedding to switch modes into different editor programs. Basically, replacing the tedium of copy & pasting provided you have the right convertors built-in.
APhoto files (proprietary) into Obsidian -> No but a raster version Yes and a link back into the AD Photo program of the master file. So AD and Obsidian have an interchange mechanism.
Obsidian SVG -> APub - Yes; Obsidian PNG -> APub - yes. Both SVG and PNG are open source and AD has convertors for Import and Export.
You want a mix of Text, Raster and Vector all in the same file. Well you could with an SVG but MarkDown handles Text and embeds Vector (SVG) and, better, links in Raster & Vector (SVG).
What confuses me is Obsidian readily capable and can hold all types of digital content (your "blocks") and mash them in countless combinations:
- You can embed a block into another.
- You can collation any number of block into a book, PDF or HTML.
- You can choose you own native editor for Raster (e.g., APhoto or Xara or Adobe CS).
- You can choose your native editor for Vector similarly.
What Affinity does not do is present a cohesive content management or retrieval system and you will be reliant on your tacit knowledge that necessarily has a shelf life.
Obsidian is extensible and handles "New Steps" while Affinity is definitely "Accepted Steps" so you will always be dancing a jig to its tune.
Other Wikis are available and we still use keyboards on computers for a number of reasons.
Thank you for helping me reaffirm my Weltanshauung.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
@Acorn Obsidian sounds interesting. Before downloading and trying it, are there any examples of where it's being used, you can point me to? I don't have a specific need right now, but there might be something in the future. Thanks. :)
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
@Ben Wiens - and anyone else reading
it has now been officially announced that affinity is being sold to canva:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/pre...nva-statement/
you may wish to take this onboard...
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jonopen
@Acorn Obsidian sounds interesting. Before downloading and trying it, are there any examples of where it's being used, you can point me to? I don't have a specific need right now, but there might be something in the future. Thanks. :)
Jon, here's a heavy example: https://publish.obsidian.md/myaiba/
Most Obsidian Vaults are running locally. There is no need to publish if it if you your own use.
Another example - https://notes.philoserf.com/Index.
Hope the offers a flavour of its richness.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Thanks for those links Acorn, I'll take a good look.
For the past few years I've been using mind maps (SimpleMind) to keep track of text notes, ideas, links and other bits and pieces, but it's good to look at alternatives.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jonopen
Thanks for those links Acorn, I'll take a good look.
For the past few years I've been using mind maps (SimpleMind) to keep track of text notes, ideas, links and other bits and pieces, but it's good to look at alternatives.
Jon, I did all my Master's notes will handrawn Mindmaps and had been using Buzan's approach for over a decade before.
I bought into MindManager for about 10 years but it palls in comparison to drafting a MM by hand.
That got expensive so I moved to FreeMind, stable v1.0.1 and bet2 2 v1.1.0, running under Java for nigh on universal.
In between I discovered TiddlyWikis and got hooked on Markdown and eventually found Obsidian.
Acorn
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jonopen
Thanks for those links Acorn, I'll take a good look.
For the past few years I've been using mind maps (SimpleMind) to keep track of text notes, ideas, links and other bits and pieces, but it's good to look at alternatives.
Acorn converted me Jon. Love it. Passwords, notes, very fast search. It’s also free. Cross platforms is where they make a buck, but you can always make a vault and open it on another rig. I really like it. I do still use google keep as a cross platform, but Obsidian is the best I’ve seen.
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
handrawn
...it has now been officially announced that affinity is being sold to canva...
Maybe they'll put a really good bitmap to vector utility in Affinity Photo now ;)) but more likely it'll be a separate app :rolleyes:
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Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Ben, I am finding you are rather quick in conflating concepts.
Should we call you Professor Acorn? You used three words in your post that I had to look up. But that's what quick access knowledge systems are for, so I learned three new words in less than a minute.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
You want a mix of Text, Raster and Vector all in the same file. Well you could with an SVG but MarkDown handles Text and embeds Vector (SVG) and, better, links in Raster & Vector (SVG).
So I've never been a fan of this concept you describe. Actually I've disliked this for the last 30 years. I see an interesting web page and would like to save it to my Zettelkasten full documents folder but I can't because it's a whole collection of things that's linked together in so many weird ways it's impossible to do that. But I see a scientific paper in Acrobat pdf format which has a collection of text, vector, and raster images all bundled together in a proper way and I can save it, move it around, email it, print it, and I love that. The pdf is about 10,000 times more useful than the html document. I wish the whole Internet would be based on pdfs and millions of other people would like that too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Obsidian (is) readily capable and can hold all types of digital content (your "blocks") and mash them in countless combinations.
OK, I actually did download and install Obsidian and also Excalidraw and have been trying them out for two weeks already. Here is an initial summary of my thoughts. If the founders had just used the JSON language which is used by the plug in Excalidraw, or SVG, instead of Markdown, it would be a great program for me as these other types can do much more complex arrangements of text, vector, and raster. And all three file types are text searchable. I like to have notes where the text and drawings are all mixed up together and trying to do that with linking is impractical as each note would be a collection of up to 100 separate files and if there were up to 100,000 of these types of notes in my system that would be 10,000,000 files and that arrangement isn't even possible in Obsidian. CAD drawings are such a collection of masses of text and vector blocks that are packed in one file so that's how it's done in that industry for good reason.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
What Affinity does not do is present a cohesive content management or retrieval system and you will be reliant on your tacit knowledge that necessarily has a shelf life.
I hear you loud and clear! But I'm in a bind, yes I've tried many workarounds over a span of one month already to use Affinity as a note taking system and none of them even work 10% as good as Obsidian but Affinity has the complex document format I want and Obsidian does not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Acorn
Obsidian is extensible and handles "New Steps" while Affinity is definitely "Accepted Steps" so you will always be dancing a jig to its tune.
Maybe, but there is a much bigger picture which is part of the whole note taking system. In the original Zettelkasten system there were (1) fleeting or rough notes, (2) A file box of permanent notes on cards containing titles and reference numbers, (3) An index with card title and reference numbers to find the cards, (4) full documents such as articles, papers, and books which might be in various places.
In the new digital Zettelkasten system, we often have the full documents in the form of the Internet or PDFs saved to the HDD. So then how do we find the information without the permanent notes and index cards? Digital indexing systems. In the beginning of the Internet people at companies like Yahoo manually created indexes for web pages, but this was obviously way too slow, and along came Google with search engines to do that job. In much the same way, the modern digital library might be able to live with mostly machine indexing. And we might use that rather because creating all those permanent notes manually is way too much work. But human written notes do have a place for one's own material and with so much information out here we need to make a note of where we found it.
But the human and machine indexes have to live in harmony. And how? First, the likely focus for me and most other people should be to create full documents, letters, note books such as lecture notes, research documents, user manuals, books and these should be done in a nice format that can be distributed in organizations, sent to colleagues, or even to customers. These should be done in a desktop publishing program to properly combine the text, vector, and raster in a professional format that can also be printed. If there is time left then we could make some permanent notes, but actually the permanent notes might just grow to eventually become the full documents, as is so often the case in my experience, so I might as well do everything in longer full documents in Affinity Publisher because indexing can now find the information in the longer documents and because short format permanent notes if used at all are now between 0-10% of the entire workflow.
The present dilemma is that Affinity Publisher doesn't have a Document Asset Management system to search the compressed file format. Obsidian does have this built in and their system is simpler because of the uncompressed text based Markdown and I understand indexing is also used. But just yesterday I did tests with indexing Adobe Acrobat documents and found I could find words in 0.027 seconds per instance and it produces a list of documents which are expandable to list all sentences with the word which is highlighted. Does this look like Obsidian or what? Indexing pdf documents results in 126 times faster searching than without indexing. Also pdfs can be previewed in Windows Explorer. Using Adobe Acrobat however is a two step process. But imagine if Affinity had a proper Document Asset Management system and the same type of indexing and searching plus a preview. Yes, this would be just as great as Obsidian now. No it's not Markdown but I don't think complex documents could ever be done in Markdown, all programs that output complex formats like Affinity Publisher, Adobe Indesign, CorelDRAW, Word, are binary. So I have no idea what I'm going to do in the interim while hoping for a proper DAM for Affinity. Maybe use the kludges.