FACT: Xara has a crippled, out-of-date type-engine.

So finally version 9 sorted out some font problems but today I read the MyFonts newsletter and my heart sank just a little again with my chosen piece of design software - Xara Designer obviously.

I was looking at the news letter and salivating over 'Desire' font and thinking about purchasing : have a look yourself (nice, eh?), but what's the point I thought. Xara Designer ... even the Pro Version ... does not support ligatures and alternative letters which are supported by the Open Type format. So I would spend $100 on this font and it would be useless. All those lovely alternatives inaccessible.

Come on Xara, lift your game, sort yourself out : let us use alternatives and ligatures with type on your software.

In this day and age it's vital for good designers because type design has moved on a lot in the last ten years. Your software has not.

+1. I have to go along with this, but not sure I'm altogether happy with the aggressive(ish) tone of the heading.
Bob.

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Originally Posted by humblenations

I was looking at the news letter and salivating over 'Desire' font and thinking about purchasing : have a look yourself (nice, eh?)

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beautiful display font, agreed

if xara touts itself as a designer's toolkit, it should expect this type of harsh criticism from a designer

Hmm. I am hearing echoes again...

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...ort-for-Glyphs
(which also should be moved here)

Are there any programs that handles these fonts where they can be exported as PDF and imported into Xara?
There's always a workaround out there so bemoaning the lack in a particular tool should be balanced by thinking what another might achieve.

I remember Acorn computers came up with anti-aliasing that Xara, as Computer Concepts, exploited in a fashion way ahead of Apple and Windows PCs.
There are always going to be winners and losers in capability in the short term.

Acorn

While there may always be adequate work-arounds, I don't believe that this would be one of them. Far more efficient to just real with the art in Xara and get it into an application that supports OTF features and place the text in it.

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There's always a workaround out there so bemoaning the ...

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And...just tried it. The answer is no, PDF is not a work-around. Ligatures drop out, old-style figures are replaced, etc., etc. It takes OpenType feature support to actually support incoming OpenType features from a PDF.

And rather than diss a valid Dear Xara wish, why not try to find a work-around that actually works and post it?

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Originally Posted by mwenz

And rather than diss a valid Dear Xara wish, why not try to find a work-around that actually works and post it?

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In what way am I dissing this? I was trying to open up the debate to not dissing Xara in the same way I would not care to diss Adobe for not being capable either.
The PDF (or other approach) might just be getting the image into Xara and using the generating program as the editor. It is still a workaround and doesn't detract from the need for Xara to get to grips with OpenType features eventually.

Xara has always been about taking its capabilities and turning them into something new for me.
The fact that I can convert a font to editable shapes and stretch and mould a letter to my exact need has always be a positive aspect.

Acorn

I e-mailed Xara and asked for glyph support in the next release. The response was they would add it to the longish list of text tool possibilities and bring it up with Charles Moir.

At this point it's about the best we can hope for.

@Gary—many thanks for the update.

@Acorn,

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...so bemoaning the lack in a particular tool should be balanced by thinking what another might achieve.

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In what way am I dissing this? I was trying to open up the debate to not dissing Xara...

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By insinuating others are dissing Xara, for one. Characterizing a valid Dear Xara and any other person's voiced approval for such a request as "bemoaning" isn't really helpful. I used the word, "diss," but if you prefer the word, bemoaning to dissing, then substitute it where appropriate.

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The PDF (or other approach) might just be getting the image into Xara and using the generating program as the editor.

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I guess you didn't read my post about PDF not working. There is, so far as I know, no way to get OT features into an application that doesn't support them. However, as I mentioned, feel free to actually find a work-around that works. Brainstorming without trial doesn't really accomplish much.

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The fact that I can convert a font to editable shapes [in Xara] and stretch and mould a letter to my exact need has always be a positive aspect.

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What vector application hasn't been able to do this for, well, ever? Not sayign it isn't a "positive aspect" in design, it is. It just isn't a unique, positive aspect to a vector illustration application.

And one can outline the fonts in Acrobat, and ID, etc. But that really doesn't help here. At least not for more than a word or two.

Here is how Illustrator and InDesign handle glyphs.

The drop down menu shows the extended character groups (when present) for each font. Then once you make a selection, the characters for that selection are displayed. In this example discretionary ligatures.

The other thing that needed to be addressed is most of these fonts with the large number of glyphs are OpenType fonts which are not represented in the Fonts Gallery.

+1 I can see this being very useful across the whole range of Xara products. From Website design to graphics to layouts. This should be at the top of that list.

+1 for me too. This is one of the weakest areas in XDP that Xara really needs to improve. It´s probably the one that's keeping me from using Xara to it's full extend on a daily basis. A good text composition engine is fundamental to support all areas where Xara can be used as @angelize already pointed out. Adobe still does a much better job here - not talking about inDesign -, just Illustrator. As do Pageplus.
I agree it should be at the top of the list too, especially now that Xara is moving to desktop publishing with a dedicated application.

Hi im a long 10 adobe users looking to jump ship from adobe. I have not used xara but will use their trials soon. My list for adobe alternatives were corel, xara and serif. Im a graphic designer.

If xara cant fully support open type and things as ligatures, lining numerals and glyphs that is a huge punch in the gut to xara for graphic designers and typographers. Xara is down on the ground and adobe is watching with a grin as corel and serif are kicking xara in the gut and head while its down with each one trying to compete to impress adobe. There is almost no way they could redeem themselves from this. They could have the best bit map editor (photoshop), best digital illustration (corel painter), best vector drawing (adobe illustrator or corel draw), the best photo light room (light room or corel after shot) and all for 300$ and still not win me over without open type!

I checked and searched all the designer products and no search results for open as in open type or mention of actual advanced type features. How can you have a dedicated desk top publishing program and claim to the be one-stop-shopping for designers and not fully support open type! Adobe has had open type for more years than I can remember and thats just in illustrator not including indesign. How can Illustrator a vector drawing program beat out a dedicated layout program that claims to be for professionals. Suddenly serif is looking much better than xara.

Good thing I decided to wait till I graduate in july to decide on which programs I get. Try each companies and see what they do in the next few months. This knocks xara down a peg or two and almost off my list of adobe contenders especially since they have no excuse as they released a new designer pro edition this year. This is truly sad! How can word perfect and microsoft word being word processors not even microsoft publisher or corel draw beat a dedicated layout program. This disgusts me.

Xara says on the Designer x9 Pro and Page and Layout designer:
ALL THE DESIGN TOOLS YOU NEED
Xara Designer Pro offers all the tools that a creative designer could need for illustration, text handling and page layout.
Designer Pro offers everything you need for handling text in your designs.

Designer Pro offers everything you need for manipulating text.
You can enter your text at any angle and you can also set your text along a curved path. Additionally, just like any drawn object in Page & Layout Designer, you can freely resize it on the page, and produce creative display text by applying any of the effects, such as transparency, fills, molds and so on - and yet the text remains editable.

Like any word processing program, you have full control over the text style and format - you can change the font, size, color and justification of the text, alter the line spacing, tracking and kerning, and have bold, italic, superscript, subscript or strikethrough. You can set margins, tabs, indents and outdents, and easily create bulleted or numbered lists (with your own custom bullets and numbers if you wish).

Text can be entered as stand alone single words or lines at any place in the document, or in single or multiple columns with advanced text flow controls between the columns, and with formatting controls such as column and page breaks.

And there's an added bonus; Xara's industry leading screen rendering makes the on-screen text a more accurate representation of the final print result, especially at small sizes or rotated.

These are not advanced text tools. Now days even microsoft word and word perfect can do these as standard features. Dont try to say these are advanced for 2013. They were 10 years ago for word processors but not now and not near advanced for desk top publishing 10 years go. They were standard.

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Originally Posted by MyCoalescen

...How can you have a dedicated desk top publishing program and claim to the be one-stop-shopping for designers and not fully support open type!...

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Xara Designer Pro (nor the other Xara applications) are "desk top publishing program(s)."

Compare XDP to AI, DrawPlus, CorelDraw, etc (etc here meaning vector drawing applications).

And here is how CorelDraw deals with alternates, ligatures, etc.

Highlight text and a drop-down arrow is displayed. Click on that arrow, what is in the font, for those characters, is displayed.

I think now that Xara products have rudimentary paragraph styles, then these OT features might as well be added there too.

Oooh !

I have used nothing but XDP for years and didn't know about these OpenType features.

+1 from me to get this supported.

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Originally Posted by MyCoalescen

How can you have a dedicated desk top publishing program and claim to the be one-stop-shopping for designers and not fully support open type! Adobe has had open type for more years than I can remember and thats just in illustrator not including indesign. How can Illustrator a vector drawing program beat out a dedicated layout program that claims to be for professionals. Suddenly serif is looking much better than xara.

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Just to clear some things about my previous post: Xara has now a dedicated desktop publishing software: Page & Layout Designer 9. That´s the program i was referring to. But despite the number 9, it has a "subset" of Xara Designer Pro 9 features and is in fact the first version of a software exclusively dedicated to page layout / desktop publishing from Xara. So it's natural that it doesn't have all the the features of the competition. I´m sure Xara will improve it over time with specific features for desktop publishing.

Xara Designer PRO started as a vector drawing program like Illustrator. It never was a "dedicated layout program that claims to be for professionals" as you pointed. So you´re being a little unfair in your comparison. Xara simply decided to go for an integrated approach and has been added a diverse set of features for photo edition, web publishing, desktop publishing etc over the years to a point where it is a now a very capable software in a lot of areas. Text composition isn't simply one of them yet. And it´s one that´s deeply integrated in the way the software work. So i suppose it's not an easy task.

Besides Open Type there's other critical features missing, like hyphenation for example, or more specific bits like optical kerning, baseline grids... So if you´re looking for strong text composition tools your best bet is InDesign or Quark Express. Serif Pageplus is a great choice if you don't want to spend much money as it covers almost everything the big guys do, but don´t count on it for any illustration purposes. For that Serif offers Drawplus (which uses a proprietary file format that's not supported by PagePlus directly - at least it was not a couple versions ago), but as an illustration package it´s miles away from what Xara is able to do, even considering it has some sounding tools like gradient meshes and some sort of skeletal brushes (both bitmap and vector based). Problem is none of them are sufficiently/deeply developed to be powerful enough or even efficient. They have several restrictions which means their scope is kinda limited (i´m considering more the vector part here - that´s what we are talking about after all - vector illustration software).

Finally, Adobe is a giant in the software world. Although i have compared software's features from Xara and Adobe, we can't forget they're a world apart in terms of financial, human and ...(insert whatever you want here) resources. So certain things may take some time to come. Better text composition tools and brushes are those (in my mind) in more need right now. That´s why i´m supporting the request for full open type support. For all the rest Xara is the way to go for me.

NO im not being unfair im being honest. It claims to be ALL you need for professional work PERIOD. Look up xaras own products and how they describe them PERIOD.

Hear read it and I quote:
Xara Designer Pro offers all the tools that a creative designer could need for illustration, text handling and page layout.
Text Handling
Designer Pro offers everything you need for handling text in your designs.
You can enter your text at any angle and you can also set your text along a curved path. Additionally, just like any drawn object in Designer Pro, you can freely resize it on the page, and produce creative display text by applying any of the effects, such as transparency, fills, molds and so on - and yet the text remains editable.
You have full word processor style control over the text appearance and formatting. You can create Text Styles, alter justification, tracking & kerning, indents/outdents and tabs and line spacing and easily create bulleted or numbered lists (with your own custom bullets and numbers if you wish). And there's a spell checker.
Text can be entered as stand alone single words or lines at any place in the document, or in single or multiple columns.

Page Layout
Designer Pro offers everything you need for professional DTP, combining advanced text controls with flexible page layout features such as drag and drop editing of images and automatic text flow around objects.
Designer Pro is great for single page designs such as business cards or adverts, but it can also handle more complex multi-column, multi-page documents with ease, with automatic text flow onto new pages, automatic page numbering, full control of headers & footers, and very flexible controls over columns and the text flow between columns. And you can have single page or seamless double page spreads supporting across-the-spread graphics.
Uniquely Designer Pro can publish your multi-page print document on the web as a single scrollable document - it's easy to view, totally WYSIWYG, and perfect for fast skimming and browsing of long documents or sharing your documents with others, without the bother of PDF. Example web document.

Designer Pro offers everything you need for manipulating text.
You can enter your text at any angle and you can also set your text along a curved path. Additionally, just like any drawn object in Page & Layout Designer, you can freely resize it on the page, and produce creative display text by applying any of the effects, such as transparency, fills, molds and so on - and yet the text remains editable.
Like any word processing program, you have full control over the text style and format - you can change the font, size, color and justification of the text, alter the line spacing, tracking and kerning, and have bold, italic, superscript, subscript or strikethrough. You can set margins, tabs, indents and outdents, and easily create bulleted or numbered lists (with your own custom bullets and numbers if you wish).
Text can be entered as stand alone single words or lines at any place in the document, or in single or multiple columns with advanced text flow controls between the columns, and with formatting controls such as column and page breaks.
And there's an added bonus; Xara's industry leading screen rendering makes the on-screen text a more accurate representation of the final print result, especially at small sizes or rotated.

Consider this:

CorelDraw x6 which was released in march 2012 and is almost 2 years old and has open type features and advanced text tools as Mwenz mentioned which are professional. Also consider that x6 is corels first edition with text heavy tools. Did i forget to mention that Draw also started as a vector drawing program? Has all the major functions of Indesign cs4. I am highly impressed by corels first text heavy attempt and if they keep on this track their next edition x7 which will be in the next few months will probably be like cs 6 and only a step behind indesign nipping at it heels. Yes CorelDraw suite is 500 but they always run sales for 10-20% off and right now during their black friday sale its 400 + free shipping + a free 100$ programs thrown in + web creator and photo-paint. So really draw by itself is more like 100$ (but you cant buy it alone).

Xara Page and Layout designer x9 was released in summer 2013. This is xaras first edition with text heavy tools. It is missing many vital text heavy tools. It is a good start but dont say it has "advanced" text tools. It came out 7 years after indesign cs2 and 1 year after corel draw x6 yet is worse than both and is the newest of the 3. Im a graphic designer and just finished a 24 page booklet. There is no way I could have completed it with the lack of advanced tools. Some things would not have been possible and others would have taken me 2x as long to do it manually.

Microsoft Publisher 2013 released in january 2013. I have not used it but I do own publisher 2007 and tested it. It has a surprising number of advanced features for being 5 years old. It is not as powerful as cs2 indesign but considering it a consumer product meant for people who know very little of layout its pretty good. Publisher 2013 does have open type and ligatures and other advanced type options and looks good for a prosumer. How sad that MS a consumber company can beat xara who is seriously trying to compete with professional programs and adobe. Did I forget to mention it is around 100 the same as xara?

Serif Page Plus was released in 2013. I downloaded the FREE starter edition which is basically a free version of 2 editions back that you can keep forever! It is comparable to indesign cs 2 with a face lift. The full version is probably more like cs 3-4. Consider how a free product can be better than xaras new product? If you decide to pay for the full version it will be better than xaras. Did I forget to mention it is around 100 the same as xara?

Adobe Indesign cs2 was released may 2005, almost 8 years old. Look indesign has character/paragraph styles, tracking, kerning, leading, and many other now standard text tools in things like ms word and corel word perfect. These are STANDARD not advanced in this day and age. After cs 2 adobe has very much slowed its progress of valued upgrades. It also has advanced features as open type options for ligatures, lining numerals, hyphens, justification tolerances, glyphs and a myriad of other ADVANCED type options. If xara cant beat an 8 year old product which in the software/technology world is as old as a fossilized dinosaur they are in serious trouble! Consider that adobe does not even care about cs2 and is almost giving it away for free and xara cant beat an unregulated near free download?

As you said xara is lacking in DTP and serif is lacking in vector drawing. Good thing corel has a toe-to-toe competitor to Illustrator with CorelDraw and is only a step behind Indesign with coreldraw. Again my best pick for alternate to adobe software is corel. They are also always running sales. They have their black friday sale for the next week. It is stupidly good sales. Some products 85% off for 9.99$ + free 100$ program thrown in, for 9.99 i get Painter Lite that can be upgraded to full painter with a discount and 160$ worth of product. Almost everything is on sale has free shipping and includes the same 100$ program for free. Their flag ship products as CorelDraw is 20% off, Painter is 40% off, Paint shop ult is 50% off and word perfect office is 60% off. Stupidly good sales. I just ordered Painter Lite for 9.99 and Paint shop ultimate for 49.99 for a whopping 59.98$ with free shipping and 2 copies of the free text motion design software valued at 100$. Sorry all but with the sales corel is doing and their quality product there is no way serif and xara stand a chance. Im waiting for corel draw x7, paint-shop x7 and word perfect office x7 in the next few months before I buy them. Adobe is could be in a world of hurt if corels next few products are as good as their reputations shows they will be. True corel does not 100% match indesign but as you said give them till their next edition for that comparison. Honestly dont think many will jump to Quarkxpress because its actually 30% more expensive than indesign cs 6...

That is no excuse for a bad product or false advertising. If the product was not ready they should have waited until it was ready. If that is xaras answer to Indesign it sounds like a failure. They are not going to win over any indesign users if it cant do the core things indesign could do in cs 2! Here is a screen shot I just took from indesign cs2. The game company Blizzard is great about releases. They will propose a date for a product and push it back as many times and for as long as it needs to be great quality. They often push their products back 2 years because they want it to be great instead of just throwing a half baked product out and expecting you to deal with bugs, updates, upgrades and expansion. Dont put it out if its not ready!


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Geez. Everything that is factually stated is, well, factual. The rest is marketing speak. Separate what the marketing dweebs say from what an application actually does.

The exact same comparison between marketing speak and reality can be written about Adobe's so-called "Suite" and their ability to seamlessly integrate with each other. And the marketing speak for CC? Much is over the top and some is actually not true.

Back in the early days of composing/publishing on a computer, these OTF features being discussed were not even possible with the font formats and their capabilities of the day.

However, it is true Xara needs to flesh out this area. And from Gary's contact at Xara it seems they will be moving forward to whatever degree of OTF support.

OK. You posted while I was.

CorelDraw--nor any other application--is not compatible in any fuller sense with Adobe products. If you want "compatibility," then you are going to have to buy and use Adobe products as has been stated in this thread.

It is true that many use XDP, CD, etc., in our professional lives. But I am not going to go out of my way to force some sort of ad hoc, poor workflow to shoehorn these applications into an Adobe workflow. If I have a customer using Adobe products and they require working files in return in the respective Adobe formats, I may begin certain work in XDP and take it into Illy for finishing off. But I would never begin something in PagePlus that eventually needs to go into InDesign or QuarkXpress. I will do all my image editing in PhotoLine, but if I need to return a composition in PhotoShop format and/or use filters and features in PhotoShop, I'll do all the work in PS. The same can be said about other formats, applications and processes.

In my work-a-day world, I cannot imagine owning one vector application, one layout application, one ... whatever. I have flexibility for most work and I take advantage of that whereas if I worked for an ad agency, I likely would only be using Adobe products at work.

I personally think this topic is beat to death.

The beating will stop when moral improves...?

I agree. The only 100% compatibility is when you make it and open it in the same program. There is still value in being able to import/export to other programs especially to adobe. As you said using multiple applications if you could not even open that file in the other program that would seriously limit you. That is why I only consider those who can import/export adobe as even possible alternatives to adobe.

Sounds like I wont be using page and layout designer for my DTP. They sound good except for lack of advanced text tools which for many will be fine but just not for graphic designers. Many who need to make simpler projects may not even notice or care. The other 2 main xara products sounds pretty good though.

The best way for companies to stand up to adobe would be to join forces and/or merge. There is almost no way they could be called a monopoly compared to adobe.

Glad that this topic has spurned a lot of debate and agreement. It's really the alternative letters as well which type designers seem to be really fond of throwing in these days into a single font rather than having the Expert / Alternative / Swashes / Ligatures in different fonts. What it really reminds me of is the whole graphic design thing where PNG with alpha channel where supported with the major browsers except for IE 6 and as a graphic designer would forgo this nice ability to make their websites prettier. And then at a certain point ... they / we all just turned around as designers and said stuff it. IE 6 not supported any more lets jump ship and use those lovely PNGs with transparencies. Making our sites way more beautiful. Now. I think the same thing has been happening over the last three to four years. I see a lot more type designers saying to themselves - right, most graphics apps support full open type features ... let's build beautiful type systems in a single font. And here we are with a so-called PRO version of a piece of graphic design software that has come out in 2013 and it's still not supported.

To put this into perspective we not have Xara putting time and effort into silly thing that don't really work and over cook the pudding ... like that 'remove background' ... I still hand cookie-cutter my bitmaps (or Stain Glass with white background if I want to keep shadows), because it's the only way to get good results, or that mask layer; talk about over complicating something, the beauty of Xara is that you don't have to have stuff on any layers if you don't want to - that's what a good vector app is all about. And still it longer supports the tools of any designer's trade: the fonts.

Any way, thanks Gerry for getting in touch with Xara and getting them told.

Here is another reason why full support for open type glyphs should come to Xara's full line of products sooner rather than later.
http://opentype.info/blog/2010/08/14...type-features/

If Xara could make Open type fonts with full support for all the extra features auto embed the way that TT web fonts currently do now that would be nice.

Agreed. For graphic design your most important tools are fonts. If you dont have fonts you dont have anything. A mark of a great graphic designer is how they handle type. For that they need advanced type tools and full open type.

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Originally Posted by MyCoalescen

Agreed. For graphic design your most important tools are fonts. If you dont have fonts you dont have anything. A mark of a great graphic designer is how they handle type. For that they need advanced type tools and full open type.

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And Designer Pro X is the flagship Xara product. If they hope to compete with the likes of Illustrator, InDesign, or even CorelDRAW then they best focus on bringing the text tool functions up to par with the industry leaders.

I might add Serif Pages Plus to that list of text heavy contenders. It is very similar feel to Indesign but probably like cs3-4 with a face lift. CorelDraw is a vector program that in there current edition added text heavy tools. Its sort of sad having a drawing program that just decided to add DTP beat out a dedicated DTP.

I can understand some if Page and Layout designer is not perfect but I would hope that when combined into their flagship Designer x9 it they would bring more text tools to the table. Currently im not even sure why Xara Designer exists. Is there some bonus features im not aware of in the bundle. It is actually slightly more expensive than the 3 separate parts. Bundles generally reduce total price and give a few bonuses. Xaras bundle costs more and with no bonuses? I would expect it to cost less for the shear fact of repeated functions from 1 program to an other and for them saving the time of processing/shipping 3 products instead of 1. Designer should offer some kind of incentive.

http://www.xara.com/uk/designer-pro/compare/

I think Xara's mentality of pursuing the hobbyist market rather than the professional market still kind of lingers. I'm not just talking about ligature control and type engines. Improvements there would be welcome, especially in font management. DP is being left behind by other apps, like Mischief and Sketchbook Designer.

I have seen that comparison page and as I said it does not appear that designer adds anything that is not already a piece from one of its 3 parts. The whole should be more than the sum of its parts. Why should I pay more for the exact same features bundled? That is insanity.

Xara does seem to have prosumer tendencies which they can do if they want. The problem is they are trying to market to at least 2 different groups and say the product is best for both. I like companies having 2-3 tiers of their products being hobbyist, prosumer and professional. This is a failing point for adobe. They offer no hobbyist and vey little prosumer products which make it hard to get into their products especially as time goes on. My little sister is 10 years younger than me and she sees learning photoshop or illustrator starting out as a nightmare as it is too big and bloated. Xara should have a professional tier as the word designer would imply and a hobbyist or prosumer tier. They are owned by Magix which does tiers of products for video and audio. I wonder why xara does not do this also.

If you want to try something out a hobbyist/prosumer tier for less $ is a great place to start. It then allows those customers to grow into the professional product if they find that they need it. Here is the thing with compromise. It hurts both sides. For this the professionals will say its not good enough and the hobbyist will stay its to expensive or complicated. They just need 2 tiers of products.

They offer no hobbyist and very little prosumer products

Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Premier Elements..

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Originally Posted by MyCoalescen

I have seen that comparison page and as I said it does not appear that designer adds anything that is not already a piece from one of its 3 parts. The whole should be more than the sum of its parts. Why should I pay more for the exact same features bundled? That is insanity.

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There is a definite advantage in having one program rather than switching between three separate ones.