Align column text across cols

[Acorn]

Hi Acorn,
I downloaded and modified your fishy example. Attached here.
Mike

Mike, I rechecked what I had published to find it wasn't the one I intended.

Your corrections, however, are far better than I had hoped to achieve.
My main premise is, if you design the blobs right, then the re-positioning of them does not affect the alignment.

When the Heading 1 is over two lines then moving it and the other shapes still keeps everything sane.

Most grateful,
Acorn

[mwenz]

XDP, or rather Xara, doesn't make this easy but it is doable.

The main issue to me is the way text styles are implemented. All the properties should be broke out separately and likely in a gallery. The context toolbar is fine for tweaking but makes it more difficult than it should be and the result is more a flying by the seat of the pants approach. This makes consistency difficult when different styles are involved within the same text frame.

As well, there should be a setting for text for text to always be in points and that includes leading. For print intended documents anyway. Using percentage as a default for leading is basically for Word compatibility. But leading rarely should be set to percent.

Anyway, you're welcome.

[mwenz]

Had to take a phone call before I was finished...

Before an "advanced" feature such as baseline grids (which there should be two kinds, page and text frame, which can/should be able to be different), I think the better things to add to XDP, which would be of benefit to both print & web, would be master pages, column guides, the break out of styles so they are clear and have listed all text properties incl. OT Features, running headers' foother, footnotes, etc.

Baseline grids are a great feature, but there should be in my not so humble opinion other things first.

When I get in publishing work, I can fully layout and produce the pdfs for two novel-types of books per day as long as the (typically) Word files are reasonably clean. That drops to 1 1/2 per day if I have much mucking around in Word. I don't expect an Xara application to be performant in that manner. It's not what Xara applications are about and never will be. But Xara could make it easier for those laying out everything from brochures & smaller to larger publications.

[Jonopen]

Mike, Just wanted to clarify that I wasn't suggesting that a baseline grid feature should take wish list precedence over other improvements like style management or anything else you mentioned. I fully respect your experience and knowledge with anything like this. I just felt the frustration of the OP's problem and wanted to try and help by thinking how I might go about tackling things. Cheers, Jono

[mwenz]

No worries, Jono...I wasn't pointing a finger at anyone (well, maybe Xara...).

Even though a very careful use of styles and their settings, ensuring independent text frames are aligned, etc., can alleviate the issue(s), I would like to see baseline grids in XDP because I believe it would aid in getting from A-Z quicker for those that use XDP for such things. It just takes more time than should be necessary to achieve what I did in my example (which can still break alignment in circumstances).

It is a good request in the pile of requests.