Faster, smarter web export

[hoja]

I'm currently working with a file which has more than a dozen large bitmaps on the pasteboard
waiting to get worked on. This layer is set to off. Then there's a few large images on page which
need to get resampled for export.

I'm in midst arranging these images to a masonry grid, play around with various reveal effects and
preview the effect in the Browser. Unfortunately this tweaking process is badly limited by long
export times (> 10 seconds) for the single page already. In fact Export even makes Xara very unstable
each time.

I am aware of ways which could speed things up. I could use simple colour fields instead of bitmaps
for testing the reveal effects or I could optimize (resample) existing images on page. But actually
I want Xara to be smarter. The program should figure out that neither content nor dimensions have
changed but only the reveal animation was swapped against another.

Currently Xara stubbornly goes through its whole preprocessing/resampling pipeline again and again
(and almost crashes doing so) not realizing that just a single timing setting for Browser rendering
has been altered.

[Acorn]

Give each of the large images a Name in the style of filename="imageName".
These will not be reprocessed making republishing the design page far faster.

acorn

[hoja]

Give each of the large images a Name in the style of filename="imageName".
These will not be reprocessed making republishing the design page far faster.

Thank you Acorn,
that is a good hint and will help me in the current situation!

At the same time this strategy makes no sense at all...
You remember when I complained some weeks ago about Xara not resampling images at export time?
That way I ended up with Supersites with ridiculously large file sizes.
Of course I wanted to have all my content to carry proper names, so I named all images. I had no idea that
this measure at the same time issues the exclusion from the resampling process!
What the heck has the one to do with the other?

Please Xara developers clean this stuff up.
Let imported bitmaps inherit their original name. Let users override this name inside Xara (e.g. by naming
it in the layer stack). Give users a separate attribute to leave the image entirely unprocessed.

[Acorn]

+1 - it really is time for a revamp,
Acorn