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

[handrawn]

expression 3.3 you mentioned will do that [though by mapping a profile rather than directly but still dead easy to use], and you can save the profiles and draw with them

[PhilM]

Hi everyone,

Camelot is mainly written in C++. The graphics primitives, and various other subsystems that need strong performance, are written in assembler. Other modules are written in various languages including Javascript.

There are several million lines of C++ source code and the earliest comment is dated 18th of March 1993.

Because the program is so large, so complex and so old, there are knock-on consequences to even the smallest change. Features that would appear to be easy can become complex very quickly but conversely, because there's so much useful code to leverage, sometimes features that appear incredibly difficult turn out to be easy.

The oldest and most fundamental data structures used by the program would now take huge amounts of time and effort to change. Nothing is impossible but cost/benefit considerations means that basic systems are unlikely to change unless there's an overwhelming reason to do so. An example of this is the coordinate system, which remains signed 32bit even in the 64bit version of the program and this, combined with the maximum zoom of 25601%, limits the maximum allowed page size. (Yes, there is a good technical reason for the maximum page size but we could increase it within the limitations of the 32bit coordinate system by dynamically reducing the maximum zoom...)

The V11 Pro feature set has not yet been finalised.

Phil

[handrawn]

cheers for that Phil, always good to know these things, thanks