More feature requests

[Gelfling]

Okay here's the second part of my list, starting with the most urgent:

-There appears to be a bug in the intersection routine that creates small linear sections near the intersection point of curved geometry.

-Being able to save and load palette definitions (colour tables) to ascii files. !ArtWorks had this option and a 3rd party program was made to edit these palettes. It was a killer combination.

-The bitmap export wizard has two options for anti-aliasing. Why not just add the a-a slider in the export dialog?

-Why is the feather tool limited to a pixel radius? Wouldn't it make more sense to limit it to the dialogal of the boundingbox of the objects that are feathered?

-Make all short cuts user defined. Most laptops do not have numpad keys which forces me (and probably many others) to use the tedious menus.

-Being able to store vector fill-definions in the fill-gallery

-Seperation into custom colour (any colour)

-It would appear seperation display is a post-effect (it interferes with anti-aliasing). Why not create a duplicate of the drawing internally and change all colour definitions. This would also speed up seperation display significantly.

-Curve smoothing only displays the number and position of bezier-knots during change of the slider. It would be better if it also directly displayed the resulting curve.

-Transparancy for layers and groups. The only way to do this now is to create a bitmap copy of the objects and make this bitmap transparant.

-Curved corners on rectangles amnd quickshapes are deformed when the shape is stretched. I would like for them to be ALWAYS circular. (maybe an option?)

-Being able to add custom linewidths to the linewidth combobox.

-PNG and JPG export buttons in the name-gallery instead of GIF

-Multiple undo (display a history list with all undo-steps and allow the user to jump back to one directly)

-A new tool to offset a curve and get a new curve. Currently the only way to do this is to use the contour tool with inset path option and then use the curve tool to cut the new closed shape.

-Slightly higher buttons in the galleries.

-A new high quality a-a type. I believe the current a-a engine only dithers to 86 shades instead of the possible 256. This hq a-a doesn't have to be realtime.. as long as we can use it to export bitmaps...

-All galleries should be dockable (on top of each other) with a slider next to them. This way they can all be on screen without claiming too much screen real estate.

-Finally, it would be cool if there was a readbale ascii version of the file format. This would enable users to easily code their own importers/exporters from and to XaraX. This filetype would probably be much bigger than the current one but for import/export purposes this shouldn't be too much of a problem.



The reason why I post all these comments is not because I don't like what XaraX is, it's because I dream about what it could become.

Thanks for reading all the way down to here,
David

[Gelfling]

Okay here's the second part of my list, starting with the most urgent:

-There appears to be a bug in the intersection routine that creates small linear sections near the intersection point of curved geometry.

-Being able to save and load palette definitions (colour tables) to ascii files. !ArtWorks had this option and a 3rd party program was made to edit these palettes. It was a killer combination.

-The bitmap export wizard has two options for anti-aliasing. Why not just add the a-a slider in the export dialog?

-Why is the feather tool limited to a pixel radius? Wouldn't it make more sense to limit it to the dialogal of the boundingbox of the objects that are feathered?

-Make all short cuts user defined. Most laptops do not have numpad keys which forces me (and probably many others) to use the tedious menus.

-Being able to store vector fill-definions in the fill-gallery

-Seperation into custom colour (any colour)

-It would appear seperation display is a post-effect (it interferes with anti-aliasing). Why not create a duplicate of the drawing internally and change all colour definitions. This would also speed up seperation display significantly.

-Curve smoothing only displays the number and position of bezier-knots during change of the slider. It would be better if it also directly displayed the resulting curve.

-Transparancy for layers and groups. The only way to do this now is to create a bitmap copy of the objects and make this bitmap transparant.

-Curved corners on rectangles amnd quickshapes are deformed when the shape is stretched. I would like for them to be ALWAYS circular. (maybe an option?)

-Being able to add custom linewidths to the linewidth combobox.

-PNG and JPG export buttons in the name-gallery instead of GIF

-Multiple undo (display a history list with all undo-steps and allow the user to jump back to one directly)

-A new tool to offset a curve and get a new curve. Currently the only way to do this is to use the contour tool with inset path option and then use the curve tool to cut the new closed shape.

-Slightly higher buttons in the galleries.

-A new high quality a-a type. I believe the current a-a engine only dithers to 86 shades instead of the possible 256. This hq a-a doesn't have to be realtime.. as long as we can use it to export bitmaps...

-All galleries should be dockable (on top of each other) with a slider next to them. This way they can all be on screen without claiming too much screen real estate.

-Finally, it would be cool if there was a readbale ascii version of the file format. This would enable users to easily code their own importers/exporters from and to XaraX. This filetype would probably be much bigger than the current one but for import/export purposes this shouldn't be too much of a problem.



The reason why I post all these comments is not because I don't like what XaraX is, it's because I dream about what it could become.

Thanks for reading all the way down to here,
David

[Charles Moir]

Good set of suggestions there, and I agree with most of them. Some are easier to do than others of course. Concerning the last point about a ASCII file format, there is one, it's called the .wix format in the export list. This is an ASCII version of our native .xar file format (and is used by Webstyle and some other products we have). The native .xar file format is documented in a very old document we created many years ago (when we called it the Flare format and had a web browser plug-in). But if you examine that document you will soon see that the .wix format is a pretty direct ASCII representation of the Flare format.

We will be updating this document in the near future to bring it up-to-date and make it easier for third parties to understand.

[raynerj]

Thanks Charles!

That is mighty nice information to know. I wonder if any other programs can deal with .wix? Gotta play some tonight!

XaraX1 can input and output wix... and it looks like all the information is there. From 1st glance anyway.

[RAMWolff44]

What a fantastic list David!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

Even better, Charles totally digs it!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Klaus Nordby]

Gelfling: "Why is the feather tool limited to a pixel radius?"

Yes, this 50 pixel limit is a terrible limitation: I often have to bitmap something and then feather it in Photoshop and bring it back to XX1 when I need major feather-blends. 50 pixels in a, say, 300ppi output is just 1/6th of an inch. So yes, vastly increasing this limit on such a hugely useful function would be great!

[Klaus Nordby]

Of course, a global "xx pixels all around" feathering feature is a rather simple-minded approach. Far better would be to be able to use start-stop beziers or gradient-meshes inside the object to be feathered, to precisely control the amount of feathering to as much or as little as you need in that exact spot. This is possible to do in XX1, of course, by making the object blend to a 100% transparent copy of itself and changing the shape where needed - I often do this when I have to, but it's cumbersome and has practical limitations.

In summary: some kind of gradient-mesh approach for feathering edges could be a killer feature in XX2!

[Gelfling]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Charles Moir:
Good set of suggestions there, and I agree with most of them. Some are easier to do than others of course. Concerning the last point about a ASCII file format, there is one, it's called the .wix format in the export list. This is an ASCII version of our native .xar file format (and is used by Webstyle and some other products we have). The native .xar file format is documented in a very old document we created many years ago (when we called it the Flare format and had a web browser plug-in). But if you examine that document you will soon see that the .wix format is a pretty direct ASCII representation of the Flare format.

We will be updating this document in the near future to bring it up-to-date and make it easier for third parties to understand. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hi Charles,

Good news! I'll dive right into the wix format. I've been looking at ways to transfer 3D wireframe data from Rhino3d to Xara for years. Currently the *.ai format is the only way, and it has too many limitations (on Rhinos side).

Hopefully I can easily create a plugin that exports wix.

Cheers,
David

[jclements]

Gelfing,

Please let us know what you find.

I know both I and Jens use Rhino.

John

[Gelfling]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by John Clements:
Gelfing,
Please let us know what you find.
I know both I and Jens use Rhino.
John <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I looked into WIX but it's a tough cookie. I'd definitely need some kind of document that explains which code means what.

David