Xara Designer Pro+ 22.1.0.65105 SL x64 Sep 2 2022 - Released

[Acorn]

Nothing about this from Xara but:

• New Table Tool - you'll have a lot of reading up for this - http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/des...Anchor:58nTJoW
  
  • Help page: https://helpandsupport.xara.com/xara...ool/tables.htm
  
  
• Mould Tool has Controls again.

Acorn

[Egg Bramhill]

Mould Tool has Controls again.

About time. Nice to be able to see the nodes again.

As for the tables I very rarely have use for these, so no comment.

[Acorn]

@Egg, don't give up on Tables right away.

You can make one as a 1x1 single ell and turn it into a text panel where the border and fill are sensibly constructed.

With a very quick test, I have found:

1. The tables are row-centric in that you can add/remove/resize text and the Row height adjusts.
   
   1. Sadly, do a resize up and back to an embedded shape and the Row sticks at its deepest height
   2. You can manually drag the Blue Row bar to adjust.
   
   
2. The Table controls have greyed out dots that are a big UI advance.
   
   1. On the UI front, the Blue Dashed bounding box for selected shapes not longer kisses the shape edges.
   
   
3. Internal program error 5508.k.No.le when trying to Paste another Table into a Cell.
4. Table Cell Border Style does not show the Dotted ones.
5. To move a Row or Column and contents, you have to create a blank one, Delete the old and Paste into the new.
6. I would still like the Xara HTML Filter to render actual HTML <table> tags...

Acorn

[Acorn]

I was going to make a series of Table Challenges so TGers could better understand the new Table Tool but in the end it has to be a series of Xara Questions.

Working in millipoints.
Select the Table tool.
Click-drag to make a 2x2 Table.
Use the Drag Row/Column Boundary to ensure the cell size is at its smallest.

Question 1
Why are the Row Height and Column Widths different (26673mp x 26261mp)?
Question 2
Input 10000mp into the Row Height.
A Dialog advises Cell size must be between 14173mp and 11338582mp.
Input anything below 14173mp and the Dialog re-appears.
Input anything greater up to 26673mp and the field stubbornly shows 26673mp.
Only when you input above this value does the Row Height change.
Ditto for the Column.
Why?

Make the Cells square - 30000x30000mp.
Set the Spacing to 10000mp.

Question 3
Now set the Spacing back to 0mp.
The Cells are now 44625x44625mp.
Put the Spacing back to 10000mp.
The Cells are again 30000x30000mp.
Why?

Question 4
Why is the Padding at such a large arbitrary value?
Why can the Padding Control not be grabbed and dragged?

Question 5
Working with the Cells as 30000x30000mp.
Note the default Border Width is still in Points (0.75pt == 750mp).
Why does a Table have no Perimeter or Area?
Switch to the Selector tool and press Ctrl+J (Join Shapes).
Note the P & A values (120900mp & 90.6sqpt)
Instead use Ctrl+1 (Add Shapes) (243000mp & 3690.6sqpt).
Set the Border to 0mp.
Ctrl+J --> (721500mp & 41.5sqpt).
Ctrl+1 --> (241500mp & 3645.1sqpt).
What is your logic not to present the Add Shapes P & A results?

Acorn

[MB365]

Hi Acorn,

We will capture your feedback (from your above posts) and determine what improvements can come from it. But curious, did you have a real table use case that you were creating when these questions arose? If so, then we would like to understand more about the table you needed to design and in what kind of document/website it was going to be used. Or were you just 'testing' the table feature for potential future usage?

Cheers,
Matt

[PhilM]

@Egg, don't give up on Tables right away.

You can make one as a 1x1 single ell and turn it into a text panel where the border and fill are sensibly constructed.

With a very quick test, I have found:

1. The tables are row-centric in that you can add/remove/resize text and the Row height adjusts.
   
   1. Sadly, do a resize up and back to an embedded shape and the Row sticks at its deepest height
   2. You can manually drag the Blue Row bar to adjust.
   
   
2. The Table controls have greyed out dots that are a big UI advance.
   
   1. On the UI front, the Blue Dashed bounding box for selected shapes not longer kisses the shape edges.
   
   
3. Internal program error 5508.k.No.le when trying to Paste another Table into a Cell.
4. Table Cell Border Style does not show the Dotted ones.
5. To move a Row or Column and contents, you have to create a blank one, Delete the old and Paste into the new.
6. I would still like the Xara HTML Filter to render actual HTML <table> tags...

Acorn

Hi Acorn,

1. (Tables are capable of growing and shrinking when text changes in all four axis directions but this is not exposed in the UI yet.)

1.1 Not sure what your test case is here (or why the embedded shape is significant) but Rows (and Cols) record their size whenever it is set by the user and won't automatically shrink below that size.
E.g. If the tallest text in a row is 5cm high, the user drags the row height to be 7cm (or sets it numerically), then types text to make the row even taller and deletes back again, the row will stop shrinking at 7cm.

3. Unfortunately this is a late introduced bug. It will be patched soon.

4. Don't understand. Table border styles are not the same as Camelot dash patterns (which don't include a true dotted type), they are a subset of HTML table border styles. Here's the borders dialog showing the dotted border style:

5. Movement of rows/cols by dragging will be implemented in the near future. The online client can already do it.

6. We're working on it.


I will answer your follow-up post next. Please bear with me.

Phil

[PhilM]

I was going to make a series of Table Challenges so TGers could better understand the new Table Tool but in the end it has to be a series of Xara Questions.

Working in millipoints.
Select the Table tool.
Click-drag to make a 2x2 Table.
Use the Drag Row/Column Boundary to ensure the cell size is at its smallest.

Question 1
Why are the Row Height and Column Widths different (26673mp x 26261mp)?
Question 2
Input 10000mp into the Row Height.
A Dialog advises Cell size must be between 14173mp and 11338582mp.
Input anything below 14173mp and the Dialog re-appears.
Input anything greater up to 26673mp and the field stubbornly shows 26673mp.
Only when you input above this value does the Row Height change.
Ditto for the Column.
Why?

Make the Cells square - 30000x30000mp.
Set the Spacing to 10000mp.

Question 3
Now set the Spacing back to 0mp.
The Cells are now 44625x44625mp.
Put the Spacing back to 10000mp.
The Cells are again 30000x30000mp.
Why?

Question 4
Why is the Padding at such a large arbitrary value?
Why can the Padding Control not be grabbed and dragged?

Question 5
Working with the Cells as 30000x30000mp.
Note the default Border Width is still in Points (0.75pt == 750mp).
Why does a Table have no Perimeter or Area?
Switch to the Selector tool and press Ctrl+J (Join Shapes).
Note the P & A values (120900mp & 90.6sqpt)
Instead use Ctrl+1 (Add Shapes) (243000mp & 3690.6sqpt).
Set the Border to 0mp.
Ctrl+J --> (721500mp & 41.5sqpt).
Ctrl+1 --> (241500mp & 3645.1sqpt).
What is your logic not to present the Add Shapes P & A results?

Acorn

Q1 The result I get in a new doc is that both Cell height and Cell width are 26261mp. You may have had a current font size attribute that affected the height (since cells are populated with text using the current attrs). This is an oddity that we are looking at.

Q2 See above but also: Row height is constrained by the size of the text within the cells. (If each cell contained at least one visible character you'd be able to see more clearly what's going on.) Note that you can remove the cell size dependency on font size by setting the "Auto-fit to container" option. The minimum size that the warning dialog quotes, 14173mp, is the size of the content rectangle in a cell, excluding padding and excluding the effects of cell borders. If you turn those things off you still can't quite get down to the quoted 14173 minimum so there's some discrepancy here that we need to investigate but it's not a major issue.

Q3 Spacing tries to work within the current table size. So when you increase the spacing value it reduces the sizes of the cells to keep the overall table size constant. But because you have actively set the cell sizes to 30000 (setting a user minimum mentioned above), the cells can't be made any smaller and so the table size increases. That table size is now big enough to contain spacing values between 0 and 10000 by adjusting the cell sizes, thus when you set 10000 spacing again the cell sizes can just expand to their previous 30000 minimum size. (Erm... I may need to think that through again!)

Q4 The default padding value was chosen as a reasonable size for a normal sized table. There are no draggable padding handles yet (there will be one day). You are probably looking at the selection blobs of the text inside the cells. Whether these blobs should be shown for text inside table cells is open to debate.

Q5 The border width control uses the same logic (literally) as the line width control. This was a specific feature request. Showing the Perimeter and Area of tables has not been looked at yet - not considered as important or useful as the myriad other features that need to be done. Can you put forward a good use case?

Phil

[Acorn]

@Matt & @Phil, thank you both for the new Table Tool. Is is a great advance and I want it capabilities to be as slick as possible yet easy for all to use and understand.

The text grow/shrink is very useful.
I simply embedded a Shape and resized and the Cell grew. When I resized back the Cell stuck at its largest so Embedded Shapes do not perform in the same fashion as text.
What is happening is if the Shape is H600xW300px and the Cell Text Width is 100px then the Shape is shrunk to scale into the Cell Text Width but the Cell Text Height is changed to 600px. You gain an Embedded Shape H200xW100px but the Cell Height is 600px.
When you reduce the Cell Height to its smallest, changing the Cell Height or Width scales properly.
You missed a calculation.


When I rendered my Dotted Borders, I get the bottom right image.
It shows fine in the design.

I look forward to the RC dragging.
It will sort out the problem with Zebra Striping.

I get the same error when pasting copies cells that try to extend the table RC limits.

Acorn

[Acorn]

@Matt, I like to talk through a simple example: One box Wonder.xar

It is a single Cell Table:



It has 10px orange Padding.
It has a blue grid symbol.
It has four different borders, 4px wide apart from the 2px left edge.

Table Menu
Selecting the single Cell, you see the Delete Row & Delete Column icons appear.
The Menu items for these both become disabled. I can not see their need anyhow.

Padding
There is no mechanism to apply non-Flat Fills or Transparencies.

Text
There is no detection of a glyph's width to grow the Column Width.

Borders
I get dots in the design but a solid purple line with circular end caps in any browser. Is stroke=url(#pattern) missing?
There is no mechanism to alter the stacking of the borders.
If you skew the Cell, the border ends are wholly disjointed.

Table Cell Borders Dialog
I think if the Dialog is open and you select something other than a Table it should hide.
'Border Filter' should be renamed 'Applied to:'.
Its presentation is over-complicated. It should really have four separate Styling options around a Cell.

Key Shortcuts
Once a table has been created, changing the number of Rows or Columns is tedious.
Arrow keys currently table around the table nicely. Alt+Arrows could create a Row N & S and a Column E & W. Perhaps Shift+Alt_Arrows to delete?

Acorn

[Acorn]

@Phil, can you explain the logic behind the Colour Bar disconnect?

I would expect and want to be able to drag a colour onto the Padding and realise the tables background colour.
Equally if I drag a colour onto a Cell in Selector mode all Cells are so coloured.
In Table mode, a drag onto a selection colours that.
Also a Shit-drag should handle the above for Cell Borders. I realise the difficulty of colouring four sides of the Cell would still need the Borders Dialog but that is the more exotic consideration.

I also find the enforcement of your current dropdowns to Named colours and the Edit of a single Local colour to be highly constrictive.

Acorn