To Aj and Xara

Since your post I've been investigating what stays as vectors and what doesn't.

Blends contours, and blends with contours stay as vectors when printed to PDF / Postscript in Xara.

It appears only bevels, feathering, transparency and drop shadow effects are rendered as bitmaps.

This is pretty much the same as CorelDRAW (where transparency and drop shadows are concerned), so in terms of format of output there is no difference.

I have some questions that remain unanswered, I have some PDFs I created with Draw 7 that have overlapping uniform transparencies that are vectors, yet on trying this recently, the overlaps are bitmaps, wierd, logic says that transparency effects get rendered as bitmaps when output to postscript/PDFs but these PDFs did not for some reason.

So part of my long post IS WRONG, Xara's strength is still in its rendering engine to screen the speed at which it does it and the flexibility of mixed mode effects.

In mitigation, when working with Xara X I am trying out things Draw cannot do, these usually involve the advanced vector effects. I incorrectly assumed (bad, bad) this was the case for all the elements of the drawing.

That plus the fact that you mentioned cutting and pasting produced a bitmap in Draw (something I do not do as rule).

If you want Xara's vectors (where possible) in CorelDRAW, then export the file as a 32bit CMX and import it into Draw. This works for uniform filled, blended shapes, with a contour effect, similar to one of your illustrated examples. The vectors will end up in Draw as individual objects, but this is nearly always the case when converting between any file formats and in this case CMX has no internal specification for blend or contour groups.

I still think that adding the initial mixed mode features you asked for to Draw with its current method of reproducing vectors on screen would not be possible (it would bring draw to its knees), Corel would have to implement an on screen rendering engine like Xara's.

So once again apologies to Xara X and AJ

Peter

The style challenged Pete'sCrypt