Quote Originally Posted by handrawn View Post
yes well..... assuming what you say is true cliff, the boat has nevertheless sailed, it is too late in the day

and there are so many things xara designer cannot do, and so if you need these things, then you are going to look at it differently; if you don't and all you do is covered by the program, then fair enough

for example xara does not do:

winding rule options
outline position options [outside-midway-inside] - this is often a real time waster
it's animation is basic [and that's being kind]
it's bitmap handling capabilities are tailored !00% towards non-destructive editing, which is actually limiting in many respects
it does not do greyscale colour space
it's cmyk is a pain to use [this may be a bit personal]

mock-ups is what xara does very well indeed [as long as you don't want CAD accuracy] - but in a project there is so much more; the hare does not always win the race
I typically use the outliner instead of line. I think my brain just thinks that way as it is. I think my biggest gripe with Xara is really a complaint with Illustrator in that they haven't kept up with Adobe's file format at all, making loading up anything exported as AI basically garbage. I expect some stuff to be broken as that's Adobe's entire business model: Use it's position as 'standard' knowing people are forced to use it in many cases and lock everyone out by constantly changing file format, creating an artificial paywall, but even programs like GIMP can keep up moderately well with the Photoshop format as long as you don't use any very specific GIMP effects.

I ran into issue recently where I needed to work with someone using Illustrator and neither program loads SVG worth a damn. If I recall correctly, at least Xara can kinda load/export SVG, but Illustrator was just ignorant to the format completely, hilariously so, since that's a web standard format. Gotta love business practices and trying to force people to a format. I wish Imaging and video formats would just agree on format like the audio industry basically has. Everything can load MIDI, WAV and AIFF, allowing anyone to recreate a project in any other software. But nope, it's gotta be a PITA for vector...either you just export rasters and continue on from there, or...?????

Competition creates headaches for us on the user end and really the competition is workflow and features, not format.