Is there any way to get Xara (Designer Pro X18) to be more accurate?

[handrawn]

What is the largest page size that is possible to use in Xara? (i.e. Before you start getting odd things starting to happen such as Control/Shift/P no longer zooms to fit the whole page)

Millipoints
Btw, I just experimented with setting my page untis to Millipoints. Unfortuntely Xara won't let me enter exact numbers.
e.g if I type in "1000mp" for W and "2000mp" for H, when I hit enter ==> Xara immediately displays W "995" and H "1999".
Nightmare.

J

PS If we can get Xara to work correctly in Millipoints, maybe I could us Points (of which I presume that there are 1000 per Point, yes?) Would that avoid these small rounding errors when you do multiple cursor keys (e.g. Right arrow 200 times)...

xara designer will not zoom out beyond [below] 5% I woulld imagine that is what is constraining your ctrl+shft+P - on my system the maximum hight for ctrl+shft+P to work is around 18,000 px you would have to determine this for yours, but it is not a page size limitation

I have no immediate answer regarding your btw point - it worked ok when i tested it, I'll look at it again

you could use points, if it does not mean you end up with decimal places would be my advice [yes milli is a thousandth]

[Acorn]

@shipen, the point of the adding of Line Widths was to show the bounding box increased and to check if that impacted the nudge distance. It doesn't.

A Shape with a Line Width snaps the to corners of its bounding box.
That box increased from the bounding box's centre for increasing line sizes or scaling.

The setting of the Scale line width is irrelevant.
Where the shapes were placed is irrelevant.

@handrawn and I have indicated millipoints are the internal dimensioning Xara uses.
Yes, there may be rounding errors for nudges in units that are not millipoints.
That is why it is not sensible to arrow nudge right across an A1 sheet.
I don't know what you are expecting but I Shift-Nudges the entire width and the grid offset was all of 0.5mei, an error of 1 in 14000 - 0.00714%.
Again, I advised to input the displacement as an addition. A shape at X: 16mei (2mm) with an input of X: 16mei + 800mm with move to 6416mei (802mm). You can mix any units.

I wold create shapes with 0px line width or an inner contour.
If any are irregular, e.g., rounded corners, I would create a shape that is the box shape of the bounding box, place that on a separate BB layer and soft-group.
Any snapping is done to this box and the required shape tags along.
You hide the BB layer for the fixed presentation.

I would create a page that is 2.834646 larger than A1.
Set your mock millimeter to be 1 point and base all calculations around that: nudges will be 125mp. [1pt is 1000mp]
When finished printout out on A1 paper or scale every down by 0.352777 so it is all true mm and A1 size.
No rounding errors.

The issue with displaying more digits is covered in https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...378#post623378.
I forgot mm only showed 1dp.
You can play with the Scaling Factor as well.

It boils down to knowing what you want and what the XDA is capable of. IMHO, quite a lot.

Acorn

[handrawn]

It seems to me that much of the time Xara is not being fully accurate, but most people are using it at a scale that these inaccuracies aren't visible.

I have not asked him the question, but I would imagine when charles moir conceived what is now xara designer he was coding it for advertising/publishing/print design where, in the 90's certainly, using [milli]points to do all the calculations in made perfect sense because that was the industry standard unit

using millipoints it is very accurate indeed; that is the unit is does all it's calculations in as has already been said

A) I do need to work in Millemetres (although I don't care what Xara calls the unis)

seems to me acorn has helped a lot in this regard, hell be hammering those nails with a spanner before we know it

[handrawn]

I have no immediate answer regarding your btw point - it worked ok when i tested it, I'll look at it again

I see it, not sure why though... but me, I would never ever work at such a small size; it may be a limitation of the quickshape creation algorithm; 0pt outline may affect it... sorry but I can only suggest you think bigger... even in enginering a fraction of a millipoint is well within tolerance unless you are doing something very special

i

[Acorn]

I think we are done here.

At 25601% Zoom, a 125mp square box fits exactly into a sub-division. On my monitoer it shows as a 1cm square.
Xara reports its perimeter P as 500mp & its area A as 20,000 sq mp. The latter is wrong as it will be 125² or 15625 sq mp.
It is wildly wrong but little is actually lost.

The following table shows the millipoint discrepancies:

Box (LxL)	P	A (mp2)	Area (mp2)	%Error
125	500	20,000	15,625	+28.0
250	1,000	60,000	62,500	-4.0
375	1,500	140,000	140,625	-0.4
500	2,000	300,000	250,000	+20.0
625	2,500	400,000	390,625	+2.4
750	3,000	600,000	562,500	+6.7
875	3,5000	800,000 (0.8pt2)	765,625	+4.5
1,000	4,000	1,000,000 (1.0pt2)	1,000,000	0
1,250	4,500	1,300,000 (1.3pt)	1,562,500	-14.8
2,835 (1mm)	11,340	8,000,000 (8.0pt2)	8,037,225	-0.5

All this shows is the A calculation needs sorting out, as I once advised.
The actual values are far more accurate.

Input a 1x1 mm box and you get 2835 x 2835 mp.
It should really be 2834.6457.

If your are working to your sub-division increments, then a rounding error will be less than 1mp.

If you are creating shapes of small millimetre dimensions, create a 1,000mp box off-page and clone that.
Snap to grid.
I would then drag an edge to the right width and then the orthogonal one to the right height.
Snapping means you will always get exact sub-division dimensions without measuring.

Do work in millipoints and scale the page and shapes as advised.

Acorn

[handrawn]

I think we are done here

reckon...

the beauty of millipoint is that you don't have to worry about europe being metric and the united states sticking to their customary system - a millipoint is a millipoint is a millipoint, and who works to less than 1mp outside of maybe the likes of the nuclear industry - the aggravation that saves when laying out artwork is worth the math [I still feel sorry for hubble]

[shiphen]

Hello again

I think we're all about to give up the will to live on this issue!

Regarding millipoints, if as you say Xara is doing its internal calculations using millipoints, you would expect moving my diagrams over to bein in millipoints would resolve all issues such as nudging errors.

Sounds good in theory... but as I said in post 28@:

>
> Btw, I just experimented with setting my page untis to Millipoints. Unfortuntely Xara won't let me enter exact numbers.
> e.g if I type in "1000mp" for W and "2000mp" for H, when I hit enter ==> Xara immediately displays W "995" and H "1999".
> Nightmare.
>

i.e. Millipoints are totally unusable, because Xara changes them when you enter them!


@Acorn
I'm going to message you directly.

J

[handrawn]

Hello again

I think we're all about to give up the will to live on this issue!

Regarding millipoints, if as you say Xara is doing its internal calculations using millipoints, you would expect moving my diagrams over to bein in millipoints would resolve all issues such as nudging errors.

Sounds good in theory... but as I said in post 28@:

>
> Btw, I just experimented with setting my page untis to Millipoints. Unfortuntely Xara won't let me enter exact numbers.
> e.g if I type in "1000mp" for W and "2000mp" for H, when I hit enter ==> Xara immediately displays W "995" and H "1999".
> Nightmare.
>

i.e. Millipoints are totally unusable, because Xara changes them when you enter them!

one swallow does not make a summer - or perhaps that should be, the absence of one swallow does not make it winter: 'Millipoints are totally unusable, because Xara changes them when you enter them!' - in this particular instance, yes... but:

Hadn't time last night, but this morning I tested this using the straight line tool with but cap ends constrained by ctrl modifier to the horizontal - entered the 1000mp/2000mp for size, no rounding, worked fine [can 'convert line to shape' if you need to]

this leads me to believe that it is indeed an issue with the quick shape creation - quick shapes are just that, you want real accuracy you create one from scratch

once you have created your shape this way, I don't think you will get the issue entering millipopints, and you can copy/duplicate/clone your base shape and resize at will

[handrawn]

here's the test file, which should open ok in ver 18

whole millipoints.xar

on reflection the issue with the other file was more evidence of the unsuitabiity of quick shape creation for this task

whoops that should be whole millipoints not millipixels better fix that - done

[shiphen]

here's the test file, which should open ok in ver 18

whole millipoints.xar

on reflection the issue with the other file was more evidence of the unsuitabiity of quick shape creation for this task

whoops that should be whole millipoints not millipixels better fix that - done

Sorry my point stands. I just tried editing your file "whole millipoints.xar". If I add a rectangle and try to change its shape to "100 "x "200" by typing the number in, as soon as I hit Enter I Xara changes the numbers to 101mp and 199mp.

Wait, it's worse than that! Each time I try the same experiment it toggles between 2 different results. Next time I type the same thing in again I get "99mp" x "201mp"
Adding the text "mp" into what I submit makes not difference.





Worse, if I try to drag them into the correct size by using the snapping onto the grid, again it give very inconsistent results. One minute it creates 99 x199, the next minute it creates 101 x 199mp.