Exporting to SVG, PDF, & PNG

I saw a request in another application's forum.

Custom toolbars have been created and the Icons included in the toolbars can be SVG, PDF, or PNGs. Exporting to SVG or PNG is not problem, I selected the icon drawn in Xara and exported the selection.

I've never heard of PDFs being used for this before but I thought I'd gave it a try. The PDF export Advanced Options (in the General Tab) has a choice of "Selected Objects"; however, it seems to be ignored and the entire page is export instead. I looked help but couldn't find any specifics for "Selected Objects".
Attachment 122540

Should "Selected Objects" for PDFs work the way it does for other formats?
Or should I just redefine the page size to match the size of the selection?

John - I am not aware of this but I know in the past when PDF documents were created they included everything. Maybe Mike W will have the answer.

Selected Objects has always used the page size + whatever objects are selected.

Whenever I have desired a PDFs page size = the selected objects, I copy those objects to what seems to me to be the least used preset, Blank Photo. I do this all the time for assets to be used in layout publications.

Mike

Thank you Gary and Mike for your quick responses :)

This is kind of a bug then for the PDF export UI.
Shouldn't the "Select Objects" option be grayed-out or not show?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jclements

Thank you Gary and Mike for your quick responses :)

This is kind of a bug then for the PDF export UI.
Shouldn't the "Select Objects" option be grayed-out or not show?

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I don't think it is a bug...simply because it does what it says. It exports just the selected objects. Xara applications are by nature page-based. Unless Xara's intended result is that when using a page, plus selected objects, that this option did produce what the Blank Photo preset does. I'm thinking that their library may be a limiting factor...I have no idea if the desired result can occur with a page-based selection or not the way the PDF library operates.

I believe there could be a couple improvements. The obvious one would be that the PDF created when objects are selected use the bounding box + any bitmap effects (like a drop shadow) as the page size just like Blank Photo does. Another improvement may be with say a right-click option to make the page size equal selected objects. This would be akin to AI's making the artboard equal selected objects.

But both of those would be an improvement, not a bug fix.

Well I tried exporting to SVG.When I compare the results to other icons of the same size and resolution the resulting svg is huge, in the neighorhood of 350+K. The others were between 6k and 9k.

The svg export options were very limited. I searched the Help PDF but found no reference info of .svg.

I imported the xara svg file into Affinity Designer and from there exported again to .svg. The file size went down to 8k. At least I have a way to work on this little project.

If any one is interested, I can post the .xar and resulting .svg export.

The reason my SVC files were so large is that I had objects the were off of the page ("clipboard").
File sizes are now in 2 to 10k range for 96x96 Pixel page.

Does Xara 365 have the ability to create PDFs which have a transparent background?

I tried the following:

• dragged a color from the color swatch onto the page which created a Page Background Layer and Layer Gallery
• I turned off the visibility of the rectangle object shown in the Page Background Layer which caused the page in the main editing window to disappear .
• I then exported to PDF and in the Advanced Properties, I checked the Exclude Invisible Layers

When the PDF is opened in Adobe Reader, the white page is displayed. I assume Adobe Reader would show a blank or checked background.

If I enable the visibility of the colored background layer, and open the file in Acrobat Reader, the background page is still white (not the color shown in Xara).

1. If I import the PDF, created by Xara with NO background page, into a new Xara file, then there is no background.
2. If I import the PDF, created by Xara WITH A COLORED background page, into a new Xara file, then the colored background is shown BUT PDFs Background layer is ABOVE Layer 1.
   * Also note that in Xara when I click on the PDF file to import it, its thumbnail doesn't display the background color.

So I really don't understand what is going on. Is Adobe Reader the problem? The PDF version or what?

PDFs simply show the page color as white, but unless there is a white colored rectangle, the page is transparent.

I dunno about Adobe Reader or other PDF viewers, but Acrobat has a preference to display the page background as a checkerboard. I would suspect Reader would also have this as a preference option.

You are correct. I just discovered that there is setting for transparency which is NOT enabled in the default installation of Reader and thought I had posted this few minutes ago.
​Edit > Preferences > Page Display > Page and Content Information and check the box for: "Show Transparency Grid"