+ After posting this topic yesterday, I worked all night trying to
come up with some more clear examples of the problems
I was having with this... as stated, it's something I had asked
about some time ago, with a specific file problem... the solution
to that - importing a PDF into XaraLX, and making it fully editable -
were in fact solved, though not entirely in XaraLX itself.

I may be asking the impossible... still, this seems like a
"most valuable feature"... so would turning water into gold I
guess :-)

+ My greatest successes... and I tried examples from all the
graphics programs I could find in Linux... were with SVGs, which
XaraLX does support the import/conversion of.
For example, an SVG imported from Inkscape, after basic coloring,
is as close to what I am referring to as a file "totally editable in
XaraLX"... this provides shapes which can now be individually
edited, re-colored easily, and which respond directly to shape
editing - everything we could hope for !
I had similar luck with SVGs generated in Dia, Figurine and Xfig,
and Gimp... yes... Gimp produces a terrific SVG output too.

I should end this now, and will look for comments from those in the
know... and I'll repeat my veiled question from yesterday... would
it anyway be possible to write a new Xara function which
took any graphic file, and automatically reduced it to this kind of
nice xara-editable form ?

Much thanks for your patience. Its a difficult topic, but one
which I consider would make a good addition to XaraLX functionality.