I recently installed the Xara Designer Pro+ trial after researching features in up to 200 different programs over a span of 34 years and am interested in the V20 option. I want a Swiss Arm Knife program that can be used both for my scientific illustrated note taking all the way up to desktop publishing for a book. I think Xara Designer Pro+ was developed with such a thinking in mind which is why I became quite excited about it when for some reason I only came to know of it recently. But so far there are some features I can't find and so they either don't exist or I can't find them even after doing a lot of searching in forums and Xara literature and Help files. I want to take or write notes in this program as it's the only multi page capable program that in the same program can do quality Bezier illustrations, can edit raster images, has text styles, can have objects moving with text, has a small file size, and is reliable. Microsoft OneNote has poor illustration and text flow capability, Adobe Illustrator has 1 page capability and huge file sizes, CorelDRAW or Corel Designer can't have objects move with text, and Samsung Notes doesn't have Bezier curves and can't be used on non Samsung computers. I also would like to do desktop publishing with the program as it would be great to reuse some of the graphics from my notes in the book and Adobe Indesign really only works well with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop and the subscription costs of their programs is very high and the file sizes very large. I studied the history behind the xar file type which seems interesting as theoretically it can be quite compact.

(1) File size: I might make 100,000 separate notes in my lifetime and am looking to make Xara Designer Pro+ into a note taking program which I'm envisioning would be an illustrated multipage capable Zettelkasten system on steroids with each note being a separate file. File size is important then. I noticed in my tests that 1 page or 3,103 characters of text is 35 K (kilobytes) with the Times New Roman 10 pt font but only 12.4 K with 2 pt text. I had an expert look inside the xar file format and it seems there is a large preview bitmap in the file, perhaps it is the 256x256 32 K bitmap that shows up in the sidebar. I can't find any setting to disable it? If it would be disabled there is a chance of 5.8 K with 1 page or 3,103 characters of text which would be the same as the very efficient Samsung Notes file format.

(2) Externally linked images: To do a book of 50-800 pages all the graphic files need to be externally linked, otherwise the program will bog down generally. I can't seem to find a way of externally linking graphic files, does it exist? Perhaps the best question is, what is the maximum practical pages of a Xara Designer Pro+ file with 2 vector illustrations per page?

(3) Equation editor: For scientific and engineering documents, an equation editor is needed, something that is OLE or integral to the program. Xara Designer Pro+ doesn't have it's own equation editor like Corel Designer and I can't figure out a way of doing OLE with MathType, I can only paste it in which can't be edited.

(4) Print on demand book printing: Is the Commercial printing PDF/X 300 dpi images what Amazon print on demand books will accept and is it acceptable quality for color printing?