Xara Cloud - Viewing Comments
Dear Xara Cloud...
The Comment capability in Xara Cloud is a useful mechanism for changes made and recorded by Team members.
It is equally useful for Designers in the Xara Desktop applications (XDA) for the exact same reasons.
The Comment Component is a Smart Shape as evidenced in its selection and manipulation of its width using the QuickShape tool in an XDA.
It is a banal UI decision that once selected with the Select tool, a change to anything other than the QuickShape tool renders the selection unselected (pretending it's not there, eyes covered, chanting la-la-la).
The critical problem in the XDA is the Comment Shape is selectable yet invisible.
Having many invisible Comments added to my Design page and layer from a "helpful" Customer using Xara Cloud would be a disaster.
The following addresses these concerns:
- The Comment in the XDA should be rendered so it is visible and editable.
- The Smart Comment capability should be enabled within the XDA.
- The Smart Comment should be available through the Online Content Catalogue for creation in the XDA.
- All Comments should be added into a Comment Layer that is initialised as Hidden.
For those interested in viewing the Comment contents in an XDA page: use the Page & Layer gallery and select any group entitled Comment; select Arrange > Convert to Editable Shapes or (better) Arrange > Ungroup.
A non-destructive approach would be to double-click the Comment group in the Page and Layer gallery and then select and Copy the text columns onto your page; this make them visible.
Acorn
Re: Xara Cloud - Viewing Comments
Yes, the commenting facility is a smartshape that is inserted into the document with some special markup to pick up signed in user, date stamp, not to appear in export etc. This is one of the few smartshapes that was designed specifically for Cloud; desktop doesn't have this SS so it's not expected to work properly (and appear as an inactive shape).
I don't think theirs any plans currently to enable this functionality in desktop, although that may change in the future.
Re: Xara Cloud - Viewing Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rob-Xar
Yes, the commenting facility is a smartshape that is inserted into the document with some special markup to pick up signed in user, date stamp, not to appear in export etc. This is one of the few smartshapes that was designed specifically for Cloud; desktop doesn't have this SS so it's not expected to work properly (and appear as an inactive shape).
I don't think theirs any plans currently to enable this functionality in desktop, although that may change in the future.
Thank you Rob.
I am afraid I have to turn this request into a Bug Report.
Having hidden but selectable Comment Shapes on my design page from a session in Xara Cloud will destroy my object manipulation.
At its simplest, I can inadvertently (Soft-)Group objects with hidden Comments and now I have a Snap to Objects fail.
Xara therefore needs to implement:
- The Comment in the XDA should be rendered so it is visible (and editable).
- All Comments should be added into a Comment Layer that is initialised as Hidden.
Acorn
