What Xara needs

[sgiff]

I was recently working on a project for a friend that involves doing a logo for a new Restaurant here in my city. I love to use Xara for illustration of logos but the only problem I have is that people want to have a version of it that they can work with once it's finished. Usually the accepted format is Illustrator. Unfortunately Illustrator doesn't handle Xara's blends or transparency very well (it breaks them up into individual colors). What I would like to see added to the already incredible feature set, maybe for a future edition is a tool that would convert a graphic that uses transparencies to solid color vector shapes by identifying the rgb values of any object that contains transparencies and converting them to solid color vector objects. It seems to me the technology is already in place to do this since when you convert a color blend and import it into Illustrator it converts it into a multitude of color segments. All Xara needs to do is to find determine the RGB value of a transparent area and it's background color and create a solid vector shape of the same color. Bitmaps with transparency would probably not work since each pixel would be be affected by it's transparency but any illlustration with only vector artwork should be able to do it. This would make it a lot easier to save a file in eps or illustrator format and pass it along for others to use. Right now it seems to me that anything I create in Xara is pretty much unuseable in Illustrator or any other program except Corel. And Corel is barely able to handle the CMX format that Xara exports. I wonder why after all these years no one has invented a public domain or non-proprietary format for translating objects that would convert to other programs. It seems that Adobe might be going in that direction with their SVG format, but will it support all of the features that are needed.

Bye the way, it seems that Xara tries to render some effects like transparency as a bitmap when exporting to EPS, but it really does a poor job and should give you the option to specify what resolution you want the bitmaps rendered. Xara also needs to add CMYK support for exporting TIFF's as well as adding clipping paths embedded into the EPS files that it exports. It also needs to allow you to specify the resolution of the bitmap header for EPS images.

s.g

[sgiff]

I was recently working on a project for a friend that involves doing a logo for a new Restaurant here in my city. I love to use Xara for illustration of logos but the only problem I have is that people want to have a version of it that they can work with once it's finished. Usually the accepted format is Illustrator. Unfortunately Illustrator doesn't handle Xara's blends or transparency very well (it breaks them up into individual colors). What I would like to see added to the already incredible feature set, maybe for a future edition is a tool that would convert a graphic that uses transparencies to solid color vector shapes by identifying the rgb values of any object that contains transparencies and converting them to solid color vector objects. It seems to me the technology is already in place to do this since when you convert a color blend and import it into Illustrator it converts it into a multitude of color segments. All Xara needs to do is to find determine the RGB value of a transparent area and it's background color and create a solid vector shape of the same color. Bitmaps with transparency would probably not work since each pixel would be be affected by it's transparency but any illlustration with only vector artwork should be able to do it. This would make it a lot easier to save a file in eps or illustrator format and pass it along for others to use. Right now it seems to me that anything I create in Xara is pretty much unuseable in Illustrator or any other program except Corel. And Corel is barely able to handle the CMX format that Xara exports. I wonder why after all these years no one has invented a public domain or non-proprietary format for translating objects that would convert to other programs. It seems that Adobe might be going in that direction with their SVG format, but will it support all of the features that are needed.

Bye the way, it seems that Xara tries to render some effects like transparency as a bitmap when exporting to EPS, but it really does a poor job and should give you the option to specify what resolution you want the bitmaps rendered. Xara also needs to add CMYK support for exporting TIFF's as well as adding clipping paths embedded into the EPS files that it exports. It also needs to allow you to specify the resolution of the bitmap header for EPS images.

s.g

[Sean Sedwards]

CorelXARA EPS does allow you to adjust the dpi of bitmaps and transparent areas via the 'Resolution' option in the EPS export dialog. You can set the printed quality of these areas, for EPS and non-EPS printers, by going to Print Options > Output > Transparency resolution.

Regards - Sean

[rs]

high,
i agree CMYK tiff export would be great. i creat flyer's, small katalogs in RGB and export them to
photoshop to convert them. this is bad. not so bad but boring.
nfg
r