The TIP Sheet

Piled Higher and Deeper TIP: Michael Schaefer wrote to correct your editor's comment made in  this month's tutorial that guidelines are hidden behind objects, etc.  Michael writes: "Your statement that you can't put guide lines in front of objects in not ture, you can . Open the Layers Gallery and drag the Guides layer from Background Layers to Foreground Layers and put it above the Layer 1. Just make sure you select Layer 1 (or whatever layer you are working on) before you return to work."

Your Editor Responds TIP: Of course Michael is correct, and somewhere in the back of what is left of my mind I knew that. I also knew (because I used this before), you can paste any object or line into the Guides Layer and the outline becomes a guideline which can be used with Snap to Guides like any other guidelines as shown in the example on the left.

What I did not know, and just discovered, is objects pasted into the Guides Layer are also just like objects on any other layer and can be duplicated, rotated, and deleted. Did you know that?

Here are a few additonal guideline chestnuts. Right click on the screen ruler and with a single selection you can Delete All Guidelines. Just like that!

To place guides a fixed distance apart, lets say every 1/4 inch, set your Grid and Ruler options to .25in. Select Snap To Grid and double-click on the screen ruler every 1/4".


John Clements Copy Attributes TIP: "By coincidence I just stumbled across this early this morning (PRIOR to reading your monthly tutorial). This should save some time in creating "identical gradient fills".

It seems my tutorial this month spawned a plethora of useful tips —Ed

Non-Xara-Related TIP: I've mentioned in the past, that to switch from one open application to another open application, you can press the Alt then the Tab key. What I have recently discovered is if you have more than one other open application, you can keep the Alt key pressed and you will see icons for the other open applications. Tab to the desired application before you release the Alt key.

If you have more than one Xara document open, you can switch between documents using Ctrl Tab.

Robert Steflik's Sanity-Saving TIP: Robert writes: I was working on a Xara project (I have Version 1.5 - dying to upgrade) for about 8 hours over the course of a week... suddenly I had a system crash and when I got everything back up again Xara would not let me open the file  (some type of access file error) - this has happened about 3-4 times in the last two years—not a lot I know—but when you loose several hours of work it can be a real setback. Anyway, when you look at the file in Windows Explorer the file size has been set to 1k and it is toast!

Yesterday this happened and I just was not ready to accept loosing all my work, so, before I shut down my machine, I checked the Windows/Temp folder where I found a .bak file  with the same name as my xara file. I renamed it from .bak to .xar and moved it out of temp and was back in business (I think it will be the last saved version, but this is still better than loosing hours and hours of work)

Robert Steflik's Top the Last Tip, TIP: Robert continues: I save my files frequently, but when a file is corrupted the file is trash. So, on real important projects, I save a new file each day so that I have a series of backups.

I use a system like this, chevy0508.xar (project chevy / may / 8th), chevy0509.xar (same project next day), chevy0509a.xar (same project later that day after intense revisions).

This has saved my sanity (not to mention my work) a number of times. And another benefit of this is when I find a client really liked something better from last week, after all, and wants to go back to that version. I just open the appropriate backup file and I'm in business.


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