Report and suggestions after Xara Free Trial experience

[M.U.D.]

Thanks for the responses to my Xara Trial Report.



Thanks to Frances (Angelize) for her tips on how to create custom palettes in Xara (.aco and .pal palettes).



Albacore was wondering why I didn't mention brushes. Funnily enough shortly after my trial ended I was using a rough textured charcoal brush in Illustrator

and wondering whether one could create similar organic lines and brush strokes in Xara. There was a limited selection of brushes in the Xara trial. Are more

brushes supplied once one buys the Xara software? I noticed that one can create one's own brushes. I would be interested to hear experienced Xara users'

comments on this feature and Xara brushes in general. Can one save one's own custom-made brushes? Also, can one create usable custom dashed

lines? I only fiddled with this a little bit but without much success.



Marc, thanks for the link to your list of Xara virtues. I agree with your comments about intuitiveness and continuity. And I think they are important

observations. After my trial I sense that Xara has a major advantage over its competitors, despite lacking many of their features, because they are paying attention to intuitiveness and continuity.

Working with graphics software all day is exhausting. At the beginning of a work day or session, one is fresh and has the energy to seek out menus,

sub-menus, hidden menus, tools and functions (like Illustrator's ridiculously hidden transform menu!) and to do repetitive tasks, but as the day progresses one has

less energy and patience and wants to achieve results with the minimum amount of clicks possible and with the minimum pondering where to find a tool or

trying to distinguish one tool button from another. (Actually, I feel exhausted just thinking about Illustrator.) Add a nasty deadline and the scenario is more

fraught. Graphics software developers should keep the stressed-out, deadline-haunted end user upper most in mind when they develop their software. A good example of intuitiveness in Xara is when you

create a new layer, the name field automatically opens allowing one to easily give the new layer a name (although in my trial version this was slightly

impeded because a right-click menu also opened automatically, and it had to be removed by pressing the 'Escape' key before I could enter the layer

name). In Illustrator CS4, for example, you have to double click on a new layer in order to

give it a name... and this becomes very irritating and enervating throughout the course of a busy day.



Xara could further enhance the intuitiveness and continuity of their software by making the text-styles menu available in the buttons palette. One could

then

drag the text-styles menu onto a toolbar of one's choice, making it visible all the time (at the moment the text-styles menu is only visible when the text tool

is selected). One could then simply select a text object and change its style with the ordinary select tool (select text object and click on text-style menu

which is visible in your custom toolbar). This would save

one the extra click or two needed to activate the text tool in order to show the text styles menu (and thereby minimise the enervation/irritation factor even

more). See a related thread dealing with the new text fly-out menu here.

(As a matter of interest, when using graphics software, do other people find annoying the

procedure one has to go through to escape from a text object when one is working with a text tool, and similarly when you want to move from working on one text

object to another? (Inkscape is very good at the latter.)



Another way Xara could help to minimise the enervation/irritation factor, would be the ability to drag colours from the colour mixer onto the colour bar

instead of

having to go through the clumsy and somewhat confusing save-new-colour-procedure (perhaps one can, and I simply didn't figure it out).


I see on the Xara website that when you buy the Designer Pro X software a graph-making widget becomes available. Does this create vector graphs that

can be further manipulated and enhanced or does it merely create a graph that is only visible in web browsers (a jpeg/png or script generated graph)?

[Boy]

I see on the Xara website that when you buy the Designer Pro X software a graph-making widget becomes available. Does this create vector graphs that can be further manipulated and enhanced or does it merely create a graph that is only visible in web browsers (a jpeg/png or script generated graph)?

This is a widget that creates js scripts and, except for the data variables, cannot be edited from within DPX.

[angelize]

In answer to your questions about brushes, Xara can only create brushes where the brush object is repeated along the path, and if your brush object is a complex group it can bog the program down. They can be useful though in some situations and you can create your own brushes and save them as a Xara document, so you could have a document with a set of brushes for a certain purpose, for example I have one that contains a set of brushes for doing clouds, smoke etc. and I just open that document to load the brushes and they will show in the brushes list.

Xara's brushes do need improvement, and I think that's what Albacore was getting at, brushes that are stretched along the path have long been asked for on the forums and certain types of transparencies don't work with brushes.

[Sheff]

Re: Brushes

What I do is use Microsoft Expression 3, the free version, then I draw/paint in that application. I cut and paste the object into Illustrator CS6, then I cut and paste it into Xara. Cut and pasting from Expression into Xara produces a bitmap rather than a vector. I use Illustrator as a 'go-between' for Xara and Expression. It's a real pain, but until Xara can emulate what Expression does, this is my process. I would use brushes more in Xara, but they're too limited to be be practical for anything beyond variations of basic repetitions.

[Fred C]

Hi Sheff,

Have you tried exporting from MS Expression 3 as a pdf and then importing to Xara? BTW--You might be interested to know that MS Expression Design is being phased out. Look here: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-US/ If you scroll down you will see that they are also giving MS Expression Design 4 for free.

Cheers,