Can Windows10 text search find text inside a .XAR document?

did you get that to work egg ? I just tried it now and no joy, as I would have expected in a xar file - what acorn suggested should work in it's own way I think, but not yet got notebook++ to try it out properly

@shipen

look it is nobody's fault

different companies have their own way of doing things - some things are standardised and some things are not - some things are kept proprietary because it makes good sense to the company, some things are 'open'

it is not for me to tell any company I am not part of how to run their business, only make suggestions, and I don't do that very often here these days because they seldom ever got anywhere [a couple did for which i am grateful]

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Shipen, try this. Create an A4 portrait page. Just create the text "Shipen". Save.
Now open the .xar file in Notepad & search for "Shipen".

---

Egg, I will stick my neck out here and suggest that does not work.
It will if you Export the file as filename.WIX as I mentioned earlier.

@handrawn - unencoded is the plain text. MS Windows and very few programs can find formatting code plus text externally. Some programs are quite limited here as well.

@shipen

1. MS offer up how third parties can create a filter for their file types. PDFs were unsearchable until someone created such a filter. Open up a PDF, DOCX, XAR file in a plain text editor and all you see is gibberish.

2. The filter to decode text may not exist for the majority of file extensions out there. Companies exist on this and have their own proprietary products to perform the decode.

3. Xara has published its file format and has delivered the WIX file extension for such a purpose. A WIX file can be edited in a Xara Desktop application.

Bottom Line. Any XAR file is searchable within its Xara Desktop application > Find and Replace (Ctrl+F). If you are after a global search for a word or phrase across a collection of XAR files then you must save the version out as a WIX format or publish and search in that or download the PDF (XDPX, XDP+). My bottom line is, if you need to search for text, you must create the right output file.

Acorn

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Shipen, try this. Create an A4 portrait page. Just create the text "Shipen". Save.
Now open the .xar file in Notepad & search for "Shipen".

---

Challenge accepted!

And yes, as expected Notepad can't find the text string.

...And your point is?

J


PS Would it help if Xara were to change their format so that there is a copy of all the text inside any .XAR document attached to the end of the .XAR file as raw ASCII??

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Acorn

Egg, I will stick my neck out here and suggest that does not work.
It will if you Export the file as filename.WIX as I mentioned earlier.

@handrawn - unencoded is the plain text. MS Windows and very few programs can find formatting code plus text externally. Some programs are quite limited here as well.

@shipen

1. MS offer up how third parties can create a filter for their file types. PDFs were unsearchable until someone created such a filter. Open up a PDF, DOCX, XAR file in a plain text editor and all you see is gibberish.

2. The filter to decode text may not exist for the majority of file extensions out there. Companies exist on this and have their own proprietary products to perform the decode.

3. Xara has published its file format and has delivered the WIX file extension for such a purpose. A WIX file can be edited in a Xara Desktop application.

Bottom Line. Any XAR file is searchable within its Xara Desktop application > Find and Replace (Ctrl+F). If you are after a global search for a word or phrase across a collection of XAR files then you must save the version out as a WIX format or publish and search in that or download the PDF (XDPX, XDP+). My bottom line is, if you need to search for text, you must create the right output file.

Acorn

---

Acorn. Yes, I hear you loud and clear. But there is no way on God's Earth that I (and I suspect most all but the most evangelical Xara users) will bother to save a special file of any type just to make their Xara files searchable.
Early adopters, hard-core geeks & True Believers, yes. But "normal" / "mainstream" users simply don't have time for that sort of thing. They just aren't interested in complicated learning curves. Forget it.

No, the only hope is that Xara do whatever it takes themselves.

A

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shiphen

Forget it.

---

sure, no problem

I am not defending the situation but if you can explain what and why you have to do this, it would help.

A XAR file is not a destination, it is a design file. If it returns 100 hits, you'll have no idea where the hit is until you open the file.

I could argue if I have text in a JPEG, I would expect a text search to work for that.

Acorn

@ HD & Acorn:

You got me wrong. I was trying to show Shipen the content of a xar file and how it's unsearchable.

I wouldn't expect it to be searchable, after all it's a vector file which may not include any text. Perhaps Xara could add a 'properties' feature which holds text used in the file but I couldn't see any real use for this.

If I want to search for a xar file I find explorer and everything a great combination.

fair enough egg, it did cross my mind ;)

Sorry Egg, I missed your pointy point. Understand now.

Acorn

Nope, I just don't get it.

OK as an experiment, I have just created various files of various types in them.
They all contains some nonsense text (in this case I added the text string "ERIKKK#3").

I then searched for the text "ERIKKK#3" using Windows's File Explorer
Windows found all of the following files:
- the .TXT file
- the .HTML file
- the .DOCX file
- the .PDF file
- the .XLSX file
- the .PPTX file (PowerPoint)
- the .mmap file (MindManager)

So, look, if Microsoft Powerpoint can be indexed/searched, why can't Xara Designer files?
Even MindManager (by Mindjet) file can be searched!

J


PS By the way, in my life PowerPoint is the dominant competitor to Xara for general-purpose creation of illustrations. Basically everyone in business has the Microsoft Office suite (which is why Microsoft has a Market Cap of $1.54 TRILLION), and almost nobody has even heard of Xara. So when working on a shared project everyone defaults to PowerPoint.

Please don't give me yet another reason why I should use PowerPoint and not Xara Designer.