Having spent the best part of three hours trying to reproduce in Xara what I am able to do in Photoshop in about 3 seconds, and not succeeding, I am now frustrated, exhausted and not a little bit pi**ed off with Xara for being so crap at it.

I'm talking about slicing a design into perfectly formed images so that they will fit into a pre-existing templating system.

I have a Photoshop template set up to do this and have used this same template to slice images for a specific cms for years. I have a faint recollection of having tried to do it in Xara years ago and I couldn't remember why I went back to Photoshop. I use Xara to create the design, but I export it as a bitmap and open it in Photoshop to slice it. But since this is the only thing I now use Photoshop for, I thought I might as well set up the template in Xara and get it to do this for me as well. Well, now I know why I went back to Photoshop.

Xara is simply crap at slicing images.

It puts pixels in where none exist and it removes pixels where they need to remain. I'm not a noob, I've been at this software for many years, so I know all about whole numbers and whole pixel sizes and nudge values etc etc etc. In Xara slicing images is not an exact science whereas in Photoshop (a bitmap editor, of course), it is. You want a slice at 10, 82? You get a slice at 10, 82. In Xara you pray for 10, 82 and you get 10, 83 when on the screen it is clearly 10, 82. Absolutely infuriating.

There, I've said my piece and I'm opening Photoshop very much against my will but because I have a deadline and I've just wasted 3 hours.



There is of course the possibility that I am simply stupid and have missed something critical, and it's a possibility I'm leaving open until proven otherwise.