Here's why I will not upgrade!

After downloading the 15 day trial and testing
the text tool, I see that the century old
problem with accented foreign (non-English)
characters remains. This is a problem from
v.1 of Xara. I need this tool VERY BAD for
my webs and although I REPEATEDLY EMAILED THEM,
Xara didn't give a damn to correct it.

So I won't give a damn to upgrade.

Hey XARA, not all your users are English-speaking
FOR KRIST'S SAKE!

(Anyway due to this problem and Xara's lack of updates for 2 years now, I jumped ship to Fireworks, which DOES SUPPORT UNICODE TEXT)

The new features are fantastic and I envy
all english-speaking users. But it's no good
to me if I can't build my web gfx in my native
language.

VERY ANGRY,
TS

After downloading the 15 day trial and testing
the text tool, I see that the century old
problem with accented foreign (non-English)
characters remains. This is a problem from
v.1 of Xara. I need this tool VERY BAD for
my webs and although I REPEATEDLY EMAILED THEM,
Xara didn't give a damn to correct it.

So I won't give a damn to upgrade.

Hey XARA, not all your users are English-speaking
FOR KRIST'S SAKE!

(Anyway due to this problem and Xara's lack of updates for 2 years now, I jumped ship to Fireworks, which DOES SUPPORT UNICODE TEXT)

The new features are fantastic and I envy
all english-speaking users. But it's no good
to me if I can't build my web gfx in my native
language.

VERY ANGRY,
TS

We are looking and have been looking at this very problem, and it is our intention to resolve it, I understand your frustration.
Apologies.

Mark Goodall
Xara Ltd

I have e-mailed Xara regarding this problem as well. I live in Korea and would like to be able to include hangul and Chinese characters in my drawings (mostly business cards and letterheads).

As it is, I have to select and cut text from Microsoft Word and then paste as a metafile into Xara. It works, but then I can't edit anything.

What a pain. As an owner from v1.2 (which I admit I picked up out of a cut-out bin at "Incredible Universe" in 1996), I would have hoped this problem might have been solved in the four years since I've been using it.

Hello,

I don't understand which problem you have with accented characters in Xara X ??? I speak french and I can type them directly inside the program or cut and paste them from others without any problems.
I work with a french version of NT4.
And on the other hand I am very satisfied because PostScript fonts problems are now perfectly solved !!!

Regards,
ivan

A lot of fonts that worked correctly under Win NT4 do not work under Win 2000. (I need cyrillic letters). Corel Draw has no this problem (Then I can convert text to curves and copy-paste to XaraX).
I did not find any way to put the characters (not curves) I need into XaraX.
Even copying from Character Map does not help.

Xara X is a unicode application internally and all text in the application and in the .xar file is stored as Unicode.
Text is converted to and from the local OS character set as and when required, so the outstanding problems with local character sets should be solvable.
Xara does support a variety of methods of inputting local character sets including dead letter keys.

Mark Goodall
Xara Ltd

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Xara does support a variety of methods of inputting local character sets including dead letter keys. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Mark, what are dead letter keys are?

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

Dead keys are used to create special characters that do not exists on some keybords, like ä, ç.

I think this is what Mark is talking about,however, I could be wrong.

Dave Zubrowski

Characters like this are displayed in XaraX just as "?". (Windows 2000)

Did the people with this problem ever try to use Crtl-accent?

For instance typing my first name: Ren Crtl-' e

BTW: in NT 4.0 it wil be enough to type: Ren'e tot get René if you installed your keyboard as US-international.
In Win9x you need to use de Crtl-key.

[This message was edited by René van der Houwen on November 24, 2000 at 06:51 AM.]

Good tip, René, it seems to work with everything I tried on my azerty keyboard, except ¨(because that requires shift).

I seem to remeber that in Xara 2, I had to copy @ from the character map too beacause I got a ? there

Stijn
www.defunkt.net

Tot get it clear:

Sometimes you need type Crtl-shift-accent

For instance: ñ you get by typing Crtl-shift-~ n

To get it clear, I don't mean
the french/spanish òõñ etc. Foreign language
Windows use alternative keyboards e.g. Greek
keyboard, Cyrillic keyboard etc.
The accented characters of THOSE
keyboards are impossible to enter.
Although, as Mark Goodall stated the fonts
are saved as UNICODE, it is very difficult
if impossible to enter these chars through the foreign keyboard.
This, I believe, is due to Xara ignoring
the standard keyboard translation libraries
of Windows, and using their own in-house
libraries.
This problem was since version 1 of Xara
and given Xara's upgrade record, I don't
see it fixed any time soon.

Thanasis

We are actively looking at the problems with Greek and other keyboards, our problems only exist on Win95/98/ME systems.
For instance the attached image was created by selecting Greek and Russian keyboards on my NT system and inputting all the keys in the normal and shifted states, those of you who are familiar with the keyboard layout will recognise this is correct (checked against the relevant documentation).
The font used was Times New Roman true type.

Also the problem documented by Nikolai Popov about using the character map utilty for entering arbitrary characters on 2000 has been fixed, this was already working on NT.

Mark Goodall
Xara Ltd