Dear Xara,

I am a big Xara fan and use it extensively. As a university Research Professor I find it very helpful for figure production where combining vector graphics and images is commonplace. The speed and accuracy of the software is a major benefit over software competitors. Members of my lab now all use Xara for this purpose, and I have converted neighbouring labs to become Xara users also. Indeed, the scientific community could be an important market - ‘Xara Science’ perhaps?

However, I have a couple of key suggestions/requests for improvements which I find very limiting at the moment.

  1. Independent resizing and rotation. I would very much like to see the ability to resize/rotate objects independently implemented in the software. This seems like a basic requirement. This is particularly relevant, for example, when importing scatter plots from other software – say the plot has 1000 points and you want to resize each about its centre, this is currently not achievable. Likewise, independent rotations should work the same way. I remember this being a feature of ArtWorks perhaps 15 years ago. Apologies if I have missed these features.
  2. Vector filling. The ability to fill objects with vector patterns - for example, hatched lines - is again an important requirement. Again, this was an ArtWorks feature. I find that bitmap fills are rather limiting.
  3. Undo cache save on exit. When a file is saved all the undo information should also be saved.


Of these, (1) is definitely the most needed.

Thanks for any support you can provide for this, and let me know if you need more details.