Why is it now so difficult to submit a bug report?

[gwpriester]

Hi Rob

Let me see if someone from Xara can shed some light on this.

[Rob-Xar]

Moooorning

Magix deal with all frontline desktop support but if you have a bug I can take a look into it and log it with the developers. Feel free to send me an email with your bug report - robert@xara.com

Thanks
Rob

[Rob-H]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the reply and your kind offer. I did eventually manage to submit the bug report and don't want to cause any confusion by sending it twice so please let me know if it is still worth me emailing it to you. My main concern was that the bug reporting process is now so cumbersome compared with the past and that the reporting form only allows a single file to be uploaded and that file cannot be in Xara or .pdf format unless the files are first put into a .zip archive file. That makes it awkward to provide evidence of a problem with .pdf export from Xara! I also couldn't see how I could see previous bugs that I had submitted or progress on this particular one.

I'd have thought that it would be sensible to make reporting potential bugs be as easy as possible otherwise people won't bother.

[Rob-Xar]

hmmm good point, bug reporting shouldn't be painful or awkward. I'll try pushing Magix to see if they can do anything or if not maybe we could throw together a form for this...

Thanks
Rob

[Rob-H]

I'm coming back to this thread again as I have now had several responses from the Magix Support desk and I have to say that I am very disappointed with the level of support so far. It took several emails backward and forward for them to understand that I simply expected a Xara file to look the same once exported to .pdf!

The latest response I have had is just to say that when photos within a graphics file are exported to .pdf they are compressed and that is the reason why the shape of a photo is changing during the export. Surely this is not an acceptable situation? I frequently design posters and flyers in Xara which need to be exported to .pdf for professional printing and I need to be able to reply on being able to export an accurate representation of a Xara design to .pdf.

I have recently discovered another fault with Xara (nothing to do with .pdf export but a problem with printing when a very complex vector graphic shape is present in the document ) but I am very much put off attempting to submit it as a bug report as I'm not sure I have time to go through the complexity of the error reporting process to be followed by misunderstandings of what I am trying to submit and eventually an explanation that that is what happens!

[Boy]

Just create a new thread in this (Dear Xara...) forum with your printing issue and give step-by-step directions how to recreate it. Xara devs follow this forum.

[Rob-H]

Just create a new thread in this (Dear Xara...) forum with your printing issue and give step-by-step directions how to recreate it. Xara devs follow this forum.

Thanks for the suggestion which makes a lot of sense in most cases but it would be tricky in this instance as to explain the bug I would need to upload a 9MB file which I don't think I can do through the forum? Put simply the problem is that with a particular very complex vector object present in a two page Xara file when printed part of the content of the document is missing. Presumably something somewhere is overflowing but I can't really describe it without showing the specific example. Fortunately I have found a work around of exporting to .pdf first and then printing and then I don't have the problem.

Sorry, the above is probably going slightly off topic. My real concern is that the recent change to first line support no longer being provided by Xara seems to have made bug reporting very difficult and unsatisfactory.