Alas, my trial of Xara has just expired.
I used it to do some of my professional work with (including a big colouring job of an existing black and white image for a textbook, enjoyed doing that using Xara's "shape builder tool" and a Wacom tablet). Here are my thoughts on Xara, for what they're worth. (Some of the features that I couldn't figure out or had trouble with, might exist – f they do please enlighten me. Also, I didn't have time to try everything or read up on everything – 30 days go by very quickly when you're having fun with Xara... and trying to work at the same time.)

Things I really like about Xara (I liked most things about Xara):
[Unfortunately, I had to cut this out as my post was too long to be accepted by the forum software... there are so many things to like about Xara.]

Things I didn't like:
  • Can't save palettes (maybe you can but I couldn't figure it out, although one can save a document templatee which saves your colours if you switch off the "discard unused colours" setting in the control panel);
  • The colour bar only has one row (this is a real problem when you have lots of colours in it, for instance when you choose to have one of the Pantone palettes show in the colour bar);
  • Colour mixer takes a bit of getting used to, seems a bit unwieldy at first;
  • If you change the settings so that right-clicking on a colour selects the outline colour rather than presenting a colour menu, there seems to be no other way of accessing that colour menu (at least I didn't have a chance to figure it out);
  • Align control box is also a bit clumsy, but one gets used to it;
  • Snapping doesn't seem to work when using the shape editor tool;
  • One can't adjust whether an outline sits inside, half in-half out, or outside the bounds of an object;
  • The "pen tool" is to all intents and purposes completely hidden (only gets a brief mention at the bottom of a page in the help file). This is a big oversight. It should be sitting right next to the shape editor tool on the main toolbox. If you are tracing an image with lots of curvy lines (such as a map with contour lines as I attempted) you can't rely on the shape editor tool, you need a more traditional bezier tool like the "pen tool" to be efficient. The "pen tool" needs to be given all the same functionality that the shape editor tool has;
  • If you left-click on an object and hold for longer than a millisecond a duplicate object is created (often useful, but also often irritating when one didn't want a duplicate)�one must be able to change the time required to hold an object before a duplicate is made. (I posted separately about this and it seems drop copies are not supposed to occur with left-clicking, so it must have been a problem with my computer/Xara/mouse settings).



Features Xara definitely needs:
  • The main thing I missed in Xara is the ability to fit (or flow) text into a shape. This is essential if you're doing "design" work as opposed to "illustration" work. Essential to such a feature would be the ability to control the margin distance between the edge of the shape and the edge of the text. Perhaps one way of dealing with this would be to make the paragraph text boxes alterable with the shape editor tool and to give paragraph text boxes a margin setting. I tried the text repel tool, but that is only feasible if you have one item in which text must fit, but as soon as you have several items, then it becomes untenable, as any adjustment to the shapes become a time-consuming and energy sapping saga.
  • The alignment feature should be tweaked so that, for example, if you want to align objects, the object you select last is the one that all the other objects align to. In most instances, this would save one having to choose between aligning to selection, or aligning to background object (is the object that I want to align the other objects to, behind the others?). In connection with this one should also be able to set keyboard shortcuts for left, right, top, bottom, and centre align. Besides selecting colours, moving and resizing objects, aligning is the next most frequent task that I do when working in vector programs. So it seems essential to me that this is made easy to do. (CorelDraw does this, at least the old version I'm familiar with)
  • One should have the option to view non-printing (invisibles) characters such as spaces, line breaks, tabs, etc when working with text.
  • One should be able to choose whether one can create objects when your currently selected layer is locked or hidden. Currently one can create objects but gets a message telling one the object was created on a locked or hidden layer. Then one has to unlock or show the layer and move the object to the layer you really want it on. This is quite irritating. It would be better if one wasn't allowed to create objects on locked or hidden layers.
  • It would be useful, once you have "expanded" or broken a 3D object apart, if it broke up into vector shapes, and not a bitmap (AI and Inkscape do this.) Also, if you group objects and apply 3D to them, it's a pity they all assume one colour along the side of the extrusion. Often one groups the objects so that they all align when they've been extruded, not so that they all take on the same colour. Try making a 3D pie chart or stacked graph with the 3D tool as it is at the moment. Very difficult.
  • The ability to independently control the curve of each corner of a rounded rectangle (as you can with CorelDraw).
  • The ability to create object styles.



Nice to have:
  • The ability to save text styles (and object styles if they become available) so one can pull them into other documents.
  • If one could drag and drop a colour from the color palette onto the UI to change the UI colour, just as one can drag and drop colour onto a page or work board.
  • It would be nice to see the size indicators on the tool bar when one is adjusting objects via their nodes using the shape editor tool.



Now I have to carefully weigh up whether I should invest my hard earned cash in Xara and become a fully fledged Xaraist. The main thing that I must consider is the exportability of documents to a world in which the majority are using AI :-( . The thing with PDFs is they always seem to break up the text. Otherwise I'm very tempted to become a Xaraist.
Xara makes vector work and design fun again.