Bouton's Wish List for Group Participation on v 11

[Albacore]

I use Xara as a drawing programme and that's it! OK I might take an odd bitmap in a do a few corrections to them but those things only take a few minutes. I took time to learn PS ages back so that's is my main bitmap editor and it's an old copy going back to CS2. Also through my job I had to learn Adobe Illustrator but I still want to use Xara as my main drawing tool but lately I find myself using Illy more than Xara because it is light on the tools that I want.

If I can ask Gary B on what he means by "create your own strokes and pressure profiles". Does that mean we could create a brush with a fixed angle, roundness, or diameter with tilt as well which could mean just about a real Calligraphic brush or do you mean something else because I would think that would be a big step forward. It beggars belief that on an iPad I can sketch away to my hearts content using a variety of free drawing apps which I then can import into Illy through the cloud which are all vector with custom profiles but I can't do the same on a Pro version of Xara through my desktop programme.

[Gare]

Hi Albacore—

No, I was thinking of something more ambitious when I mentioned making your own pressure profiles & strokes. Remember Creature House Expressions from back more than 10 years ago? It went beyond making and saving your own presets: It was actually a tool that let you build your own tools. Here's one of the more interesting presets from Strokes & Pressure profiles:



Now, all you really can do is change the size of the stroke and recolor it...you can't change the design of the stroke, for example, if you needed a wider triangular shape.

Here's what you can still do with Expressions free open beta version 3 circa 1994. First you make a drawing, then click the Define stroke button and you get a bounding box around the drawing that you fine tune, and then tell Expressions that you want the stroke ro repeat:



Okay, this was hasty work s my design isn't flawless. But you see that this IS the Pressure and Stroke Style feature, except there's a box to make your own? This would make maps and fancy borders a snap.

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

I'd like to see a B-Spline tool in addition to the rest of the drawing tools in Xara.

A B-Spline tool creates a perfect arc between control points with an additional "hull" point by which you can steer the curve. B-Spline tools produce perfectly smooth curves segments, ideal for design and typography work. Our Shape tool currently supports smooth curves, I think everyone is asking too much of a single tool, to be able to make straight lines, smooth curves, and so on, at the price of time and a learning curve.

CorelDRAW and Expression have had a B-Spline tool for years, as have modeling programs where smoothness is a necessity.

It's not a Bezier tool:



My Best,

Gart

[gwpriester]

I wonder if the reason that some of these suggestions have not been implemented previously has to do with the basic program itself and what is easy and/or possible to do and what is not easy or even impossible to do with the current code?

It would be interesting to get some feedback on this from some of the programmers.

[mwenz]

I wonder if the reason that some of these suggestions have not been implemented previously has to do with the basic program itself and what is easy and/or possible to do and what is not easy or even impossible to do with the current code?

It would be interesting to get some feedback on this from some of the programmers.

Most of the features can be programmed in, well, just about any language, much less fixing issues already present. I think the real issue is allocated resources, vision, drive—despite Charles's statement to the contrary...

Take on the world

So what next? It's simple: we intend to offer our customers the best web and graphic design products in the world, all over the world!

Charles Moir
CEO and founder
Xara Group Ltd

[handrawn]

someone, back in the last decade I think [quite possibly Xhris] said that the core engine of the program was written in machine code, hence the speed of execution at the time

so it may be a victim of early success, since that aint so easy to interface with, especially if the programmers that did it are no longer with the company

[Gare]

Illustrator has had this feature for a couple of versions now, and I’d love to see something like this implemented in Xara.

Whenever you draw a path that has an outline width, you can change the width at a control point by using the Width tool, the connecting paths taper off, and what you can do with a path is turn it into true calligraphy, or whatever you like.



-g

[Sadler]

Here's what you can still do with Expressions free open beta version 3 circa 1994. First you make a drawing, then click the Define stroke button and you get a bounding box around the drawing that you fine tune, and then tell Expressions that you want the stroke ro repeat:



Gary

Can't you already do this? Draw your shape, click on "Brush tool", click on "Create Brush" in the toolbar, then "Edit Brush" to change the spacing, rotation, pressure profile etc. About the only thing this doesn't achieve is bending ones shapes around curves.

If this isn't what you meant, please elucidate.

I participate in a forum for another software where the developers will ask for clarification of good or interesting ideas and will try to explain why certain ideas are not feasible. Their release schedule is every two years though since they are only a four man team. I realise it is not fair to compare developers responses between different companies and products but it might appease some of us if there were a bit more informed input into these sort of threads.

[Gare]

Hi Sadler—

To open this discussion to better understand what I'm begging for, is yes: I do indeed need the stroke along a path to follow the path along curves, because after all, if you're making a vector path which is flexible, and coating it with a vector repeating design, why can'tr the design element distort just like we can distort the underlying path?

One of the almost late, great, and almost Dead Creature House Expression is that to a certain extent, you build your own tools and then use them. They either have or had a patent on something called Skeletal Stokes; these are underlying vector paths you use to draw/paint, and then reshape or redefine, or refine a brush. Xara's Custom Brushes do not operate as Expressions' do because Expressions distorts—curves and fits and just enhances the path, while can see in your example that the individual vectors don't match up. I'm trying to clarify here, and not be antagonistic, because you and I are talking apples and oranges at the moment.

Here's a different example:



Fool disclosure: it took me about an hour to draw all three shapes, but then saving them as a strokes took about 30 seconds. I drew these three path, they can be edited any time to change the overall design, they can have different drawings assigned to to the existing skeletons (paths) they can be scaled and the program knows when to and when not to repeat a segment and to round off corners.

This is a pipe dream of course, and Phil, thank you for stepping in with the best reply. I don't think any of us want one line of code broken to introduce someone's dream feature, but perhaps compromise might move the drawing tools forward— some of use use Xara as the best illustration tool, and not necessarily for image editing or website creation.

I cut my teeth on CorelDRAW, and when CorelXara was introduced I stopped using DRAW almost completely because I fell in love with the anti-aliasing and the speed of CorelXara.

I would settle for a calligraphic pen, not the Shape Painter tool that immediately produces a "dead", non- refineable path, but some facility for building your own pressure profile, make it repeat, make the brush stoke editable, let us change the path with the Shape tool, and let the paint stroke update until you want it simplified into individual shapes.

I'd also like to see the Smart Shape Polygon tool created dynamically editable shapes: you can add control points after the object is created AND you can set a property for both the control points and the curves that are bound by two control points. IOW, you could add a few control points to a polygon shape with 22 sides and looks like a circle, make these segments straight path segments, and then pull them out of the general polygon shape with the Shape tool so you have a drawing of a gear, which presently requires several Boolean steps to get the outer path looking right, plus a couple of moves with the Blend tool.

More intuitive new tools would add weight to the claim that Xara is the world's fastest drawing program, not just because tight code, but because you have the tools people have been asking for, for years.

Me? If something is not do-able, I'd appreciate a comment addressing my request just as you did by a programmer, that says, "No can do" and I'll shut up about the request in the future.

Thanks!

Gary

[Sadler]

Since Hsu coined the term in 1993, perhaps the patent on Skeletal Strokes expired last year.