NEW: Xara Page & Layout Designer

[dcahall]

"when it is released"
Hans

Can everyone see the glow on my face. I did not read close enough.

I would suggest they remove the "TRY NOW" button until it is available.

[EJ]

OK, It looks interesting and certainly columns, styles and page numbers are valuable things to have. However, there are a couple of other things that I cannot see mentioned. (This may be because I am lacking my morning coffee).

Footnotes and endnotes.
For long documents, especially those that are technical and academic in nature it is almost essential to have a footnotes and endnotes facility. These should automatically renumber when further notes are added or removed.

Table of contents. etc.
Serious contenders for preparing long documents have the ability to produce a Table of Contents with updated page numbers, as well as related tables such as Table of Maps, Photos etc. The Table of Contents in particular is very valuable in later stages of preparing a book when structuring chapter content is being done. It is not the ability to produce the table that is important - that can be done manually, but the ability to make changes in a book of say 500 pages and see almost instantly how this has affected the overall structure.

Captions and headings with floating images.
One of the great bugbears of using Word with images was that when you floated the image the caption would stay behind. There were really serious problems with keeping floating images themselves in place in Word. As a result many people went (go) out of their way to use inline images and this inhibits creativity. Xara uses text repel which means images can float but when I used it last (Xara 6) it was still messy to keep a caption in place with the image. Grouping does work but it would be very good to have the caption automatically coupled to the image say as part of the style.

Any comments on these issues?

regards, Erik



What is the situation here?

Erik

[steve.ledger]

Text can be anchored to images since version 7 of WDP, PGD and DP.

[gwpriester]

@EJ - These advanced publishing features are not automatic. You can create a style, i.e. Footnote, but you will have to manually increase the numerical value.

Table of Contents and the top of my wish list, support for glyphs will have to come at another time.

[jon404]

For corporate work, you'd better be able to copy-paste in PowerPoint graphics, with their transparency and shading. Saw that it had support for .docx, so maybe Xara's caught up with Microsoft... hope so, on the graphics side.

Or, maybe almost. P&GD9 lets you copy-paste PPT shapes as a bitmap OK, but when you copy-paste as vector art, the transparencies, like on shadows, don't come across too well. You'd have to remake with a Xara shadow if you had to replicate the original corporate art as a vector piece. But maybe P&LD9 will have that figured out.

P&GD9 and PowerPoint --

[jonazen]

Nice surprise! Looking forward to these features -- but in the guise of DPX. I also skipped to the end of the features list and was pleased to see import/export of "docx" format documents; yes -- it's noted as "beta", but that pretty much has to be assumed when you're attempting compatibility with a Microsoft product like that. I'll be very interested to see how I might fit the new Xara DTP features into a workflow that includes MS Word, i.e., where does each start and leave off. Also - as others mentioned -- I'll be interested in learning about the length, size and complexity of documents it can handle. Finally - features like a live, auto-updating TOC and auto-updating Footnotes will be invaluable in allowing this to become a full featured stand alone product. Exciting to see this -- looking forward to it. As per Kate's admonition, I'll plan on pouring at least two cups of tea before looking really hard for the upcoming version of DPX.

One thought: it came up in the thread that DPX will remain at 32-bit program. Yet WDP9 is optionally available as a 64-bit install (which I opted to install). Does this suggest that WDP9 (64-bit) might actually be able to handle larger and more memory-intensive websites than DPX9 will be able to handle, since it will be limited to 32-bit memory addressing? If that's the case, I can actually see a reason to own both, potentially...

All in all -- nice announcement. Looks like we actually *will* have Christmas in July this year...

[zaphodeist]

I suspect that XDP will be like XWD - you can download and install both a 32bit and a 64 bit version with the same unlock key

[csehz]

Assumingly if someone creates the Table of contents in Word and paste to the Xara document, that should work without any additional modification in this new product?

However sure so if any modification is needed in that, again needs to go back to Word

[bcire68]

Of course you can wait until the final document is complete before creating the TOC in Word. But you are correct that changes would need to be made in Word again. Then again, not everyone has Word and I'm not sure how the alternatives to Word are at opening the .docx format.

[gingerbeardman]

Can you give us a comparison table between all these three programs.

Here it is: http://www.xara.com/us/products/designer/compare/

Web Designer 9
vs
Page & Layout Designer 9
vs
Photo & Graphic Designer 9
vs
Designer Pro X

I assume it will eventually be updated for DP9