Video Tutorial Dimensions

[Egg Bramhill]

This is a video about dimensions in XaraXtreme. It's more a point of discussion than a tutorial, noting some of the strange effects that can be encountered using the "Scale Line Width" icon. It's very vague, but I hope it encourages discussion.

View it here

[David O'Neil]

You came close to mentioning another item that caught me by surprise. In the attached image, the outline of the transparent copy of the shape IS NOT constant, although you would expect it to be so. Just make a shape, give it a thick outline, then give the shape a transparency. You would expect the outline to be constant, and not be 'AND'ed to the interior shape (or whichever logical operation is taking place). This working is duplicated on shadows made from the object, as shown.

I hope this explains the issue. It is kind of neat, but I do not think this is the behavior most designers would expect in this situation.

To get the expected behavior, the interior shape will have to be manually matched to an exterior 'empty filled' ellipse with the desired width. Unless I missed something somewhere...

David

[Egg Bramhill]

Exactly David. As you say "I do not think this is the behavior most designers would expect in this situation". Once your'e aware of it it's not difficult to correct, but if your'e unaware it can cause a great deal of head scratching.

[2-Cents]

Is that what they call over print? A mean woman at a printing company yeld at me about a design I made. She said that the printer has trouble with over print lines.

[Kman]

Excellent video and explanation, Egg. Thank you.
Also, David, thanks for your explanation. Perhaps the
Xara programming folks will comment on this irregularity.

Ken

[remi]

Is that what they call over print? A mean woman at a printing company yeld at me about a design I made. She said that the printer has trouble with over print lines.

I think, she meant "spreading and choking" with "over print lines".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Spreading and choking is a prepress technique, more often referred to as trapping. It consists of creating small overlaps between abutting colors in order to mask registration problems on the printing press later on in the graphical production.

Remi

[Charles Moir]

The is the correct and deliberate behaviour. The rules are relatively simple to understand. They are defined by the Adobe Postscript standard which is the basis for all modern graphics and illustration software. Even software that seemingly has no relationship to Postscript tends to use these same rules (e.g. GDI+ and XAML from Microsoft, Flash from Macromedia, and of course SVG from Adobe (under the guise of W3C))

• The outline of a shape (or stroked path to use Adobe terminology) is a separate thick line that is 'stroked' along the shape or path, and thus it's really a separate item to the shape, although attached to it.

Thus the rectangle Egg's drawn is 120 pixels wide. It's sometime useful to know the size of the underlying object, ignoring the outline thickness. The rectangle part remains the same size no matter what outline you apply to it.

On the other hand it's sometimes useful to know the total dimensions of objects including the outline.

Equally sometimes you want to enlarge or reduce an object but keep the outline the same thickness. Other times you want to scale the whole object, including the outline, in proportion.

So we've combined both features into the 'Scale line width' button, on the Selector Infobar.

• With 'Scale line widths' on, the normal setting, when you scale an object the line thickness is altered in proportion. Also the dimensions shows are for the total object including line widths.

• With 'Scale line widths' off, the line thickness does not change when you scale an object and the dimensions shown do not include the line thickness.

So the one button serves two purposes.

• Thick outlines (the line 'stroke' in Adobe-speak) are drawn exactly along the outline (path), half in and half out, as pointed out above. This is the default behaviour of Postscript.

And this is why when you make objects with thick outlines semi-transparent you can see the outline (stroked path) is half over the shape and half outside. And where the outline overlaps the shape it's darker because it consists of both the shape and half of the outline.

This is standard behaviour for Postscript and all applications. It may not always be useful, but I would argue it is what most designers are used to.

If you want to avoid this behaviour in Xara, simply group the shape, even if it's a group of one object. Now when you alter the transparency it uses group transparency rules and so treats all parts as one, so now the outline and shape are treated together and become transparent as one object.

Hope that helps and explains why it works the way it does.

[Seagull]

Hey Egg

So far I have seen all your tutorials......good show old man!!!!!heh, heh....a bit of british humor there I expect. Listen, why don't you start a new thread that links all the tutorials on it. Ask people not to reply on the thread to keep it as simple as possible, then every time you make a new tutorial you just have to update the thread.....neat idea huh? Don't know if it will work cause everybody will be congratulating you on it but having all the links in one place is better than what happens now. Oh, by the way, I read page 121 if you get my drift!!........keep up the good work.......frank

[jclements]

Charles, I did not realize that, "If you want to avoid this behaviour in Xara, simply group the shape, even if it's a group of one object. Now when you alter the transparency it uses group transparency rules and so treats all parts as one, so now the outline and shape are treated together and become transparent as one object." Thanks.

If this is not noted in the Help file, then I would like to request a reference note be placed in the topic concerning Outlines Widths as well as in the topic related to Grouping.

Gary P., if you are reading this, could you place this in the tips and tricks section of the XaraXone?

Regards, John

[jclements]

Example of blending two rectangles with thick outlines, one being grouped before a transparency is applied.

Kind of a strange affect.