Xara Xtreme Pro v3.2.3.2440

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What's new in Xara Xtreme Pro 3.2 since Xara Xtreme Pro 3.0
Xara Xtreme Pro is the flagship of the Xtreme range, adding high end features requested by Xtreme's active user base of professional designers. The 3.2 update contains a large number of useability improvements, particularly to fill, color and text handling, as well as new features such as RAW and XPS filters (Microsoft’s new rival to PDF), and improvements to existing features such as PDF import and export and Vista compatibility. For more details read on...

Xara3D 6 included!

Xara3D 6 is our enormously popular 3D tool (sold separately for $45), ideal for quickly creating 3D graphics, such as titles, headings and logos. You can copy vector graphics from Xara Xtreme Pro, and paste into Xara3D to create dramatic 3D effects, and then paste the result directly back into Xara Xtreme. View a tutorial that shows some examples.

Bitmap and Photo Handling Improvements

Xtreme now integrates with external photo editors. Double-clicking on a photo (or bitmap fill) will open the image in your favorite* photo editor, where you can edit the photo as required. Clicking save automatically updates the image back into Xtreme.

Xtreme still contains the Xara Picture Editor as the default photo editor, but is now also bundled with an alternative Magix photo editor.

* This feature has been tested with Adobe Photoshop CS, Corel Paintshop Pro X and Gimp.

There are a number of other significant photo handling improvements:

Photo Drag and Drop

It’s now much easier to import photos or replace photos in existing designs – just drag the photo from your file explorer onto the page. If you drop it on top of an existing photo – even one inside a group or used as a bitmap fill - it will replace it. Drop it on the background and it just imports it as a new photo.

Photo resize, rotate, and push

When you drop a photo to replace an existing photo, it’s smartly resized to fill the shape. New direct drag tools allow the image to be rotated, resized and re-positioned just by dragging. So it’s now easier than ever to use texture and photo fills.

Smoother, Faster Zoom

We've enhanced the scroll wheel zoom so it's much smoother, less flickery and faster. For those that prefer to have the scroll wheel zoom always, there's a new option to make the scroll wheel always zoom in and out, rather than document scroll (useful if you're working on photos a lot or single page documents). In combination with scroll wheel press (to pan documents) this provides a really, really efficient, keyboard-less way to zoom and pan around your documents.


Faster Document Scrolling

We've also enhanced the document scrolling using the mouse wheel to make it accelerated. So scrolling through larger documents is now a lot quicker and more efficient.

Color Handling Enhancements

There have been significant changes to the way colors are handled, removing clutter from the UI and introducing some quicker ways of working, altogether making it simpler, cleaner and more productive. Changes include:

New Standard Palette

The old template based selection of primary colors has gone and been replaced by a 'Standard Palette' of 46 pre-defined colors (5 shades of 7 standard hues and 10 shades of grey, black and white). Standard Palette colors, like PANTONE Colors or other library colors are not editable and are designed as a simple, limited selection of colors to apply to objects (either by dragging on to the object or clicking).


Named Colors

In older versions of Xara Xtreme, a new Named Color was created and added to the color line whenever you created a new color. This typically resulted in dozens of Named Colors appearing in the line, even though most of them weren't actually used. This no longer happens. When you create any color (e.g. click one of the Standard Palette colors) it just applies that as a local color to the object. You can of course edit this color using the Color Editor as always (Ctrl+E). Only if you select the 'New Named Color' icon in the color editor is a new Named Color created.

Automatic removal of unused colors

When you save and load files, all unused Named Colors are now removed from the color line. This results in a much, sometimes very much, simpler and cleaner color line.

Linked Colors

Linked colors (that is ones tied to a parent) are now represented differently on the color line (smaller rounded rectangles), so it's much easier to distinguish which are normal independent Named Colors and which are linked to a parent.

Right click on color line

There is now a context sensitive menu that gives access to the most common color operations.

Right clicking on the 'no color' patch produces a slightly altered menu; with 'clear line color' and 'clear fill color'.

Re-ordering colors

You can now just drag a Named Color on the color line to re-position it.

Smart object coloring

If you've ever drawn a line and then clicked a color and wondered why the line color didn't change, then you'll appreciate the new smart object coloring. Xtreme now detects whether the shape is open or closed and a left click will now set the line and fill color of an open path (i.e of an unfilled shape).

Bitmap Contoning

If a bitmap or a bitmap filled shape is selected, then the right click context menu on the color line allows you to set the contone colors as well as the line color.

If a shape is filled with a bitmap (photo) then clicking on color line will contone a shape filled with a bitmap (instead of converting it to a flat filled shape as it used to in older versions). So this is now consistent with the behaviour of real bitmap objects.

Improved Fill Handling

As you know the single click-and-drag method of creating graduated fill and transparencies remains a key benefit of Xara Xtreme. We've now added the ability to push the fill (retaining the relative positions of the end points) within the shape. You can either just drag anywhere on the fill arrow - the whole arrow moves, or hold Shift while dragging. So now with a single click-drag you can set the start, end and angle, and another click re-position the fill as required.

New Key Shortcuts

• Holding down space bar now does a temporary switch into the Push tool.
• Plain numeric 1, 2, 3, 4 set the zoom to be 100% to 400%. Number 5 key sets it to be 50%.
• Ctrl+W closes the current document, as is becoming an industry standard.

There are a large number of key short cuts in the Text tool – detailed below.

Copy / Paste to / from Microsoft Word

You can now copy 'rich text' from other applications such as word processors and paste into Xtreme as text, and the fonts, margins, line spacing will be preserved. This makes it dramatically easier to retain the style and appearance of your text.

When you paste 'Rich Text Format' from other applications you are given the choice of pasting the text in as 'Unformatted Text' which means it will appear in the font and style at the cursor where you paste, or Rich Text Format which means it will retain the style of the source text.

This also works the other way around. You can copy text in Xtreme and paste into other applications that support rich text editing and the style (font, size, colors, margins etc) will be retained.

Some applications, such as Microsoft Word, have a 'Paste Special' menu option that provides a wider range of paste options. These applications will sometimes allow you to choose the format of the pasted object (text or graphic).

Right Drag Copy

Copying objects on your page is a very common operation when creating graphics, and Xtreme now makes this easier than ever before. In the Selector tool if you right-drag, then the object will not be moved but copied instead.

What's more, while dragging (with the right mouse button held down), each time you click the left button a copy of the dragged object is dropped at each click.

Easy Rotate

To accompany the new easy ways of copying objects there's now an easier way to rotate objects without having to go into Rotate mode.

Whereas before, you had to click on an object with the Selector tool to toggle between resize mode and rotate mode, now if you're in resize mode (the normal mode) if you hold the mouse-pointer just inside the corner selection handles (see illustration) then the pointer changes to indicate that dragging will now rotate instead of resize.

So now you can resize and rotate all objects on the page without having to toggle between rotate and resize mode.

Download:

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