Sean,

Re. bitmap editing, you're right - I should have done it a different way, and I will in future. Using Xara to do a make bitmap copy is a good workaround, thankyou. I'm still a little confused as to why the colours were different, since as far as I could tell both image and patch were defined in RGB and I thought I'd matched the components, but it's possible I was just being incompetent. I still think it would be nice to have ArtWorks's ability to edit with selective plates shown (Xara XI, perhaps).

The memory may have become limited on my machine - especially on disk, while I wasn't looking. I was certainly using the default Xaradraw.DLL, so I'll put the large memory variant in place and see whether it helps. And clear out my hard disk a bit. :-) The bitmap was originally edited in a machine with only 24MB of RAM (although my current box is 96MB), so it may have been mangled at an early stage. I'll try extracting the image and checking it in another application, then restore the file to Xara. Could be a legacy problem.

I spotted the nearest pixel on bitmaps while printing - glad to hear that may be improved. My particular case was genuinely a lack of resolution, rather than aliasing, but I agree this can be a problem. On those grounds it's a pity that Xara 2 seems to top out at 600dpi - hence my choice of 360dpi when targetting a 1440x720dpi printer. The slight increase to 720 dpi would have been welcome, but - as you suggest - I felt a multiple of the printer resolution was the safest bet.

Regarding your interpolation suggestions, you have me intrigued. I know a little about sampling (I work for a 3D graphics company), but not in the real-time sense - i.e. I know about accumulating samples for given filter kernels, but not much about resampling existing images. Would you mind giving some background on the bilinear/bicubic sampling selection?

Which reminds me of another thread I meant to start...

Thanks again for your help,

Andrew