Line and brush transparency

[rudolfus]

I found out a strange thing about Xara, a peculiar thing about brushes:

Earlier on I commented to the Xara support service that it would be nice if Xara Designer would except transparent line shapes, comparable to the options of, let's say, Inkscape. Nou the funny part: I own all the possible versions of Xara, from CorelXara 1 up to XaraDesigner Pro, but also - since I am a Linux freak - the LX version of XaraXtreme, which, by the way, was a very neat attempt to win a place in the Linux community. On my laptop I have a duo-boot system Linux Ubuntu 10.10 with Windows Vista (the worst Windows of them all) and I switch between programs with almost every drawing I make. Normally I start line art in Xara - any Xara, even the LX one in which I have to configure the bars on every start-up - and then switch for the shading to Inkscape lately because I love the way, line and shape can be coloured separately in shades and transparencies. But now I found out that the only version of Xara that excepts the drawing of transparent lines, even with linear and elliptical (etc.) shades of transparency, is the Linux version of XaraXtreme. And setting this option gives future lines the same affect. With the proper brush shape, nice shadings can be added to the drawing and holding down the escape key while drawing lines makes XaraXtremeLX the perfect drawing tool for illustrative purposes, even more useful than XaraDesigner. Maybe someone might consider this fact, that the lost and almost forgotten free version in at least 1 aspect is winning it from even the latest and most advanced version of the Windows based program.

One might wonder: Why Linux in peeps name? First of all, one might consider that everything is free on Linux, even hundreds of programs - not all of them very useful, but still... Second: No viruses on Linux. Third: more use of memory resources on Linux. In short: Linux (for most parts) is what Windows should have been and it's getting better and faster every six months.

[handrawn]

you can get windows versions of xtreme [and designer] to draw transparent lines

but you need to activate a registry option to do this outside of the program [with regedit or xareg for example]