Hello everyone,

I'm working with Xara Designer Pro X since many years now and
frequently (3-5 times per year) build websites with it, but also and mainly use
it for flyers and presentation documents. I even had a 'Corel-Xara' license
when Corel sold it. I have to say I'm a great fan of Xara and would like to see it
climb the 'Olympus' of vector graphic software products finally. It does deserve it.

I have to state, that Websites are not my 'bread and butter' job.
I'm a 3d-Graphic & CAD Freelancer mainly.

Over the years I however successfully built some quite fat sites and could
acquire some basic skills concerning website-building.

Here eventually comes my Point/Question:

When viewing their new website for the first time, when it had gone online,
many of my customers asked me, why the fonts would not be selectable
and oftentimes would look blurry.

I used to tell them, that this was a technical thing, due to Xara's internal data management
and since everything else worked out well, they bought it. It was no lie.
I did not realize, that this was avoidable. But I was of course wondering too.

Some time ago I found out though, that 'soft groups' work differently concerning that effect.

If I i.e. group a rectangle and a text-element/word with the ordinary 'group'-command and then
preview it via the website preview, it is obvious, that the text-element and also the rectangle
are being displayed as a pixel-object.

If on the other hand I use the 'soft-group'-command to group the same two elements,
one can clearly see a crisp font and the rectangle has no pixalation as well, as one would exspect it.
Also the font is selectable, while this is not possible in the former case.

I would like to know, if anyone out there can explain to me, what the reason for this
'strange behaviour' is. I guess there should be a good reason for this?

Amazingly I can not find any clue in the help-section on grouping/soft-grouping concerning this topic.

I just can't believe, that I'm the only Xara-User, who extensively and over many years used
the 'grouping'-command to keep WIP-sites tidy and in order.
Since I never stumbled upon any tutorial on this and never found any warning-sentence
in the help-section, I simply did'nt even realize (up to now), that 'ordinary' grouping should
be avoided, in order to keep fonts selectable and crisp vector graphics instead of pixalated objects.

Any hint, as to why this pixelation-thing/behaviour has been introduced in the first place, while
on the other hand it seems possible to avoid it when using 'soft-grouping'*
instead of 'simple-grouping' would be much appreciated.
*I don't remember, when 'soft-grouping' was first introduced, but there was no mentioning,
that this was a means to avoid pixelation when grouping elements with the existing 'group command'"

I strongly appologize for not being able to come to my point in only 2-3 sentences :/

BR, Claude

... simply curious, since I found out about it ...