Page Size Problem

[Jimi King]

I'm trying to do some artwork for a large sign. I have set the page units to centimetres (cm) and have tried to set the size to 297cm x 95cm. But I get the warning message that the page width is invalid. It tells me that it must be a positive non-zero measurement, and that the maximum for page and margins is about 9ft (2.75M).

So I tried setting it to 275cm, same message. Tried changing the units to metres and entered 2.75 x .95. Same warning. I even tried rounding up to 1m as .95 is presumably not a positive non-zero measurement but it makes no difference.

Am I being really thick here?

[handrawn]

'about' ? .... helpful eh?

9ft is 2.7432 metres - perhaps reducing it a tad more.... ?

[steve.ledger]

You'll have to reduce the Outer margin (Spread) to zero if you want 274cm.
By default it's 20cm and is used in the overall calculation.

There's been a lot said over the years about this silly page size restriction. Clearly it's not an easy thing for Xara to fix.

[Jimi King]

Yes it is a little vague isn't it.

I settled for 270cm with no outer margin in the end. The signmaker can add 25cm of black at his end (hopefully!).

[instinctive.de]

I usually just divide the real dimensions by 10 or 100 or 1000 etc. in these situations - so for example, if I want a 6m x 2m sign, I create it as 6cm x 2cm in Xara and just keep in mind that it's actually meters

It's mostly not hard for the print shop etc. to just scale up

[Jimi King]

Unfortunately I used live effects (Chrome... as usual) so that wouldn't really be an option. So I ended up exporting a JPG then re-opening it in Photoshop to convert it to CMYK and added the required missing centimetres on each end.

Not ideal but I think I got there. Well it hasn't been sent back yet so hopefully all is fine.

I wonder if Xara will ever give us the ability to export CMYK bitmaps.