Posters with Xara X - Examples

[John Rayner]

the Maximum size Tiff I can get out of xara x1 is 16384 pixels on the largest side, lets say a 30"X30" picture at 600DPI or about a 697 MB picture. Xara could open it too... It's the only time I have seen xara run as slow as CD, PS or AI. I sized the full size picture down to 600X533@2619 DPI. Took 10 minutes to save the 20M .xar...

Not bad for an emachine with 500meg of ram. see pretty picture...

[John Rayner]

Okay, I think I have the biggest graphic yet... Same picture exported as an uncompressed tif at maximum size/DPI using xara X = 11.1GB I wonder what a printshop would do if I brought in a couple DVD's with 1 picture spanned accross them.

[joroho]

John, When working on a poster of that size, do you actually have the setting of Xara to a 4' x 8' page, or do you work with a proportionately smaller page size and then export to 4' x 8'? I would think that working with a document page that's 4' x 8' would be very cumbersome.

.joroho.

[jclements]

Hi Joroho, good question.

This is what I did and why ... perhaps I should re-think this for future projects.

Because the font size specifications were stated in inches, I worked in the 4' x 8' format (I added dropshadows as the last step to prevent slow-downs when changing zoom levels). Continuous changes in graph elements and the wording by the various contributors were done while I was laying things out. It was a priority to have similar types of text all the same font size so I often had to reposition and rescale text INTERACTIVELY with the mouse. I then followed-up by checking the text heigth, excluding the descenders, in inches. It was like putting together a big puzzle; the challenge was to be sure that everything was readable, met specifications, balanced white space, hopefully attractive, and still contained all the info the contributors felt necessary ... luckly I had the help of a good technical editor whom was able to whittle the text down to the essentials.

Also, working with a smaller page size and then exporting it to a larger bitmap size I believe would tend to blur the final output. Out of practice, I always size things in the drawing window to the actual physical size I need before exporting.

With the poster which had the lady in it, I did do test prints scaled down to 11 x 17. I also used the 11 x 17 format to produce jpgs which I emailed to team members on the east coast (whom did not have Xara) to evaluate.

[raffon]

I have been trying to get the folks at Willamtte Print and Blueprint to get XaraX for their shop for years. If they had only listened to me you could have given them a .xar file! I have been their network guy for years. They are great people to work with and if anybody want more info on them, drop me an email.

[alexbozhenov]

Here is banner I made recently for the trade show (as well as logo, PowerPoint presentation and all other printing stuff). Not very beautiful (because I had couple hrs to make that), but... thanks Xara!!!

Banner is 48� x 76�

[wW]

John,

Attached is the print formula. This should help with understanding what the printers tend to require from i-us. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

Jens,

I worked the display project with XaraX earlier in the year, prior to the new X1 release. Didn't realize that XaraX1 had larger dpi & page size capacities. Thanks for letting me know that X1 can do this. (Haven't had a need to use X1 at such large output size, since upgrading). The previous version of Xara would not export beyond 300dpi & had a page size limitation as well. Had to work at scale.

So my "wish", (not a complaint Jens) for future versions came true.... XaraX1 can do!

Kudo's Xara Ltd!

wW

[John Rayner]

"The previous version of Xara would not export beyond 300dpi & had a page size limitation as well. " - Ww

I just created a 3000DPI tif using Xara X. the drop down box only went up to 300, you could type in whatever value you needed up to the max of 65K dots I think. I would post the example, but the file (1.3M) is larger than the 300k upload limit. The closest I can get is posting the dialog...

[Mark (theKeeper)]

This is really great information everyone thank you very much for opening this topic. I've always wondered about how/what to do for projects of this size.

Thanks. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[wW]

I stand corrected on the dpi ya'll. Thanks John & Jen's for sett'n me straight.

I always chose my DPI by the drop down box. It only went to 300 if I remember correctly. Didn't realize you could enter a dpi. Nice!

Thanks again for the info. What a group we have here!

wW<><