Some questions about Designer Pro (v20, perpetual license)

[James505]

you are stuck with this i'm afraid

xara has 'smoothing' but no stabilisation in the modern sense and there is no way round it - the program seems to try to guess where you want to go next which is back seat driving at its worst when sketching

it has been like this since 2003 when I first used the program and probably since inception; xara have never shown any inclination to change it - my honest advice: use affinity designer instead if this gets in your way [as it does for me]

"Secret" to be told... Affinity Designer's brush system (unlike Affinity Photo's brush, which is very accurate) is also neither perfect (somewhat workable, though). It adds always some extra smoothing (quite increased in zoom-out situations) which makes it not fully accurate. I made my mind about it a while ago. Besides I am mostly a raster software person when it comes to painting (I am also a g. designer). When I need vector drawings, which is going to be an increasing need, next months from now, what I do is one of the following, depending on the project's type and requirements :

a) I totally "free style", wildly draw it on Clip Studio, Rebelle or PaintStorm (or Krita in the free world), or even draw on paper and scan, then just carefully "ink" it with the usual "node per node" tool that one gets in every vector app out there. "Old school".

b) The first step in (a) but I ink with Inkscape (or, directly inking with Inkscape, from scratch), the single one vector tool (with the exception of Adobe Illustrator) that seems accurate in the process of getting your ink lines just as you draw them. [But you do have to feel OK with the red highlight of the lines (some active segment) while you draw, and the "sections" it draws only while laying the stroke. Silly thing, but it bothers me, lol, when the line is very thick].

c) Like first step in (a) but in this case carefully inking as a finished inking, but just in raster (pixels). At a huge resolution, as if going to print in very large scale. So that the auto tracer that Inkscape uses (based on Potrace) will do a fine job. With certain special settings, it does a fantastic job, if the file is that big. ONLY if the optimization of nodes is not a problem for the output (not in my case, for those projects). Yet some final vector clean-up and fixing is preferable. For me it's the most enjoyable, as I am actually just working in raster, which I prefer. For many projects this technique would be (a bad decision) very crazy to use, though.

(c) is the fastest, my most probable route for next months. The best, technically, is indeed (a), a solid drawing/composition made in whatever (traditional or raster software), then carefully do the vectors node by node. I do (a) or (b) when I have the time and the project requires it / pays well enough (hehe) . (b) is a very nice compromise in terms of speed / output quality. Not great for 'fast production' (very niche use), though.

BTW, nice that you mention Affinity Designer, as I am indeed an Affinity user, for years, and many more years, an Adobe user (for the job). I guess you might have received some influx here, since the Canva's news. I'm not pessimistic about that acquirement, though, at all (one of the few). But in the first days I was, slightly, and I looked around, then one day I realized that Designer Pro is in a big discount... I had indeed wanted to buy Xara Designer Pro for a while (years), but as I only want it to have it as a fantastic companion tool (not main) the normal price (even less the case with Corel Draw) would mean not a great deal for me, as in many ways I am getting "redundancy" with tools (both raster and vector ones).