Freehand tool. Trace mode missing.

[DD]

I was watching the first of the Xhris new videos yesterday and he covered "trace mode" in the freehand tool.

I had never noticed trace mode as I don't do much photo work with XDP.

It seems to be missing in XDP11.

Has this functionality gone to some other tool ?



Dave D

[PhilM]

Hi DD,

We felt that the LiveTrace feature didn't work well enough and was not used much so it has been removed from V11.

Phil

[Xhris]

V11 of the course I'm working on will not mention it. It never seemed to work well after V6 anyway and produced bad results generally, as Phil says. You'll notice that in fact, I use V6 of Xara to do the video recording, otherwise it doesn't work. However, I wish they'd reinstate sketch mode on the shape painter tool which was taken out after V8. Loss of functionality with that gone (painterly feathered strokes when inking).

[handrawn]

there's a registry key for that xhris

.... Options/ShapePainterTool/ShowSketchModeButton set to 1

[Albacore]

I agree with Xhris on this I could never get to accurately follow much unless it was really well defined pixels from one area to another. If I was doing a trace over a bitmap I would lock the bitmap layer, create a new layer use the Pencil Tool with a middle of the road smoothing setting, trace very quickly over the area that you want to copy/remove, then press F4 (Shape Editor) to create a accurate area-clicking on the line to add points to fit and suit your area.

Have not missed or wanted this tool.

[pauland]

there's a registry key for that xhris

Xara is the only software that I know that has users messing around directly with registry keys.

It should be somewhat of an embarrassment to the company that they feel the need to do this.

[handrawn]

some confusion here between sketch mode and tracing mode? [the latter has gone]

[Gamerprinter]

Yeah, I've never had much luck using the trace tool in any version of Xara (nor any other software as well), though I currently use XDP9. I've always hand-traced anything I needed, even hand-tracing photographs (though I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you're insane like me).