AJ
Please see attached an image, done in CorelDRAW V7
The fill and transparency tools are often under utilised in Draw.
Fills and transparencies can contain bitmaps and vectors.
Using these it is possible to simulate a lot of Xara's effects such as elliptical fills and transparencies.
For cutout effects, I export masks created in Photo-Paint as paths and import them into Draw, to create vector cutout shapes for bitmaps, this gives me all the speed/control I require (possible since Draw/Paint V9)
The reason why a lot of Xara's effects export as bitmaps is because that is what the finished effects are, the under lying structure of each object may be a vector but the rendered results are bitmaps. This is true of all the advanced effects like bevels and object feathering.
The only way to get effects from Xara into CorelDRAW as vectors is for Corel to adopt a rendering engine as powerful as Xara's, whilst on the surface this may seem a good idea, you then have the problems of exporting the effects to other packages other than bitmaps.
Draw sticks to its vector roots as much as possible, certain effects like drop shadow and gradient transparency have to be rendered as bitmaps when output, and you only have to look in the Corel newsgroups to see how many problems this causes to some printers if you don't first convert drop shadows to bitmaps and then sometimes alter the transparency mode blending.
I'm not too sure about the status of mixed mode effects, it might be possible in Draw, but I don't know enough about how Xara does it, it might be internally calculating a bitmap for on screen / printer rasterization or the might be true vector objects when exported, I haven't investigated too deeply.
I am very happy for Xara to carve out its own niche, it has superior artistic creation tools no question, but Draw is a true Graphics processor, it has automation facilities to die for can read and write to as many graphics formats with as much compatibility as I require.
Peter
P.S. I own a copy of Xara X
The style challenged Pete'sCrypt
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