Adobe is ignored

[behzad]

Why do I keep going back to xara? I do almost everything in it.
Adobe is being forgotten

[steve.ledger]

Is this a rhetorical question ?

[behzad]

Its just a feeling, emotional expression

[handrawn]

'mission statement' ?

[behzad]

Hello handrawn, wow two pussy cats and a wabbit.

[handrawn]

ha! a purrr-fect combination mes petits lièvres

[michaelbuddy]

Oh believe me, I'd love to ignore Adobe too, problem is, Xara isn't available for OS X and Illustrator is one of the only options there.

Photoshop is still unmatched, though if GIMP gets the interface overhauls they have been recieving from people, it will be easy to move to GIMP.

InDesign would be another app to replace, and I'd love to, as soon as Xara can link images, not just embed them and can handle bleeds better. I think linking text boxes across pages is a necessity there too.

[gwpriester]

Adobe Illustrator because it is so old is burdened by the legacy of its original menu-driven way of working. It is really very non-visual and unintuitive. And like CorelDRAW, it is too overloaded with features.

Xara is lean, though not as lean as it once was, quick and intuitive. It has a much more flexible way of applying gradient fills and gradient transparencies. Illustrator has not advanced to gradient transparencies.

A lot of the problem, as I have come to learn from the Xara folks, when I requested a very simple feature such as CorelDRAW's Ctrl R to repeat the last operation, is in the basic code. The basic code seems to make some things easy to implement and other things (in Xara's case Ctrl R) very complex and difficult. But I digress.

Xara is streamlined and can do just about anything you need it to do. And what it can't do, you either don't need, or you do in another application.

Gary

[steve.ledger]

....And what it can't do, you either don't need, or you do in another application.

...provided you have not used anything other than lines and spot colour fills, Xara exports much of the illustration as raster which defeats the purpose of a primarily vector app. Therefore when necessary to continue working in another application this often means working with an un-scalable version of your illustration. Xara's canvas/document size limitation is sometimes a pita and frankly quite silly for a *vector* application.
If CorelDraw or Illustrator could open & fully work with .xar files then 'oh happy days'. But this is never likely to happen.

Xara is most definately my Vector drawing app' of choice for all the reasons Gary mentions, and I agree with his assesments of CD and Illustrator - I just wish I wouldn't run into Xaras limitations so often (as I do).

[geminiguy]

I still never truly understand what people mean when they say that xara cannot produce a "scalable" vector graphic to work with??? Is this not what the .xar for each produced graphic design is??
I am just now learning to work with inkscape, due to a couple of people saying this very same thing... but what I have noticed is, when you scale a .xar file, no matter what size you make it, or break apart to re-scale specific items... everything remains the same shape, and when many parts are grouped, everything retains the same placement.
When you do the same with an .svg file in inscape.... (even if the entire subject is grouped) every single item completely distorts out of shape and placement???

Scalable, to me... means I can reproduce an image to any size I desire or need with as little aggrevation or need for re-work as poss.... Xara provides this with the .xar, the inkscape .svg does not.

Am I completely wrong in this theory?? (could very well be... I am psychotic)