PDF Export error Xara X10

Hello:) Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere. I have looked, but found nothing of relevance. I'm running Xara X10 on a Windows 8.1 machine, both the 32 and 64 bit versions. Both versions - in administrator mode and normal mode - give me the following error message whenever I try to export as PDF. " Serious Error from Xara Designer Pro X10. Access Violation Exception at 0X4C479042" The export will then hang at 21% - or some other seemingly arbitrary percentage - and I have to close Xara...sometimes with a force close through Task Manager. I've only just upgraded to X10, so don't know if this is a known bug in the software or if it's just local to me. Any help would be hugely appreciated. Thank you :)

If it helps any, the same file opened in Xara X9 - both 32 and 64 bit versions - exports to PDF without any issues at all.

I think just local to you. Can you check if there is anything off the artboard as this causes errors. Do Ctrl+A and check if the boundary nodes are far off the artboard as sometimes objects can't be seen in normal screen res. If there is nothing there post your .xar doc here and we all can check. If you don't want it to publically seen then you might want to raise a ticket with xara.com

Thank you :) As far as I can see there's nothing off the art board, but just to make totally sure I'm going to recreate my document from scratch using all the bits from the old one. I'll let you know :)

Hello again :) Further investigation reveals the problem to be drop shadows! If I delete all the drop shadows then the file exports perfectly ok. I had some default-ish drop shadows on a few arrows and a few clipped(into-no-colour boxes) and blurred semi-transparent boxes used as drop shadows beneath some semi-transparent boxes ( normal drop shadows would have shown through) Anyway...deleting all of them solved the problem...made my pdf look a bit flat though! Any thoughts? :)

1. Try Blends is one way, --- 2. using the contour tool, press Ctrl+Shift+S, then Ctrl+U, then move to suit. These two methods keep it vector and I would go from dark to lighter colour. You could also try cloning shape, and using if you want a floor shadow, using the Mould Tool and maybe a linear transparencies although these are also rendered the same as shadows as a bitmap. Feathering any object to a nice soft edge is also rendered as a bit map. This is the area that can cause the problems if drawn over something else. Also if you were using arrows from the design galleries some of them are given weird fills and separate lines with many, many control nodes. Don't know about ver. 10 mind you with the smart arrows. Even though I am a mod. I don't want a version that hasn't added anything to help me draw vectors and I feel embarrassed at the situation. The easiest way to solve any of these RGB effects which are rendered as a bitmap is to make a soft group of the object and if you can the background to the object and make "A bitmap Copy" (Ctrl+Shift+C) and that solves the problem when it comes to print. Should say with True Alpha Colours selected from the popup menu.

Curious as to the dimensions of the file.

As a note, if the same file outputs from a previous version, consider filing a bug report to xara.com. They should know.