The Name Gallery is the newest and most ambitious of the Xara X Galleries. This gallery helps you to keep tabs on all the elements of your currently opened documents including Named objects (more on this in a minute), Fonts, Bitmaps and Colors. Clicking a circle next to one of the items in the gallery identifies the object as it occurs on the page. For example, selecting a font highlights all instances of that font in your document. This is useful, for example, if you want to locate an isolated instance of a font in your document. There are a lot of elements to cover in this very complex gallery. Let's begin by examining the gallery buttons.

Not all the button functions are available. When a function in not available, the tile is grayed out. All these button titles are available here because I recreated the gallery dialog illustration as a vector object.

Apply This button is used to give names to objects. This function does not work as you might expect however. If you have a name associated with another object, you may choose to remove the name from the other object using the Remove button and then Apply the name to a new selection of objects.

New... creates a new Name and applies it to all currently selected objects. Objects do not have to be of the same type, for example objects can include QuickShapes, rectangles, colors, fonts, and bitmaps.

Select selects all objects that have any of the specified properties. For example if you selected the color red and pressed Select, all objects on the page, text, objects, etc. containing the color red, will be selected. Select is usually used by first selecting only the title bar, or title bars (hold down the Ctrl key to multiple select) with the desired properties, then pressing Select to select all objects with the designated properties.

Remove removes the Name from any selected objects that have all or part of that name but does not remove the object, or objects themselves, from the Name Gallery.

Rename Changes the name of a selected Name in the gallery. For example I can rename the default name given to three selected objects "3 Selected Objects", to "Foreground Objects".

Intersect selects only the selected named objects that contain all the specified selected properties (fonts, colors, bitmaps, etc.)

Delete removes the Name from the gallery but does not remove the item from the page.

Export exports, or re-exports, a selected item. Select the object's name, not the circle to the left of the name. You can change the export properties by selecting from the Export Properties drop down list. (See the image slicing tutorial on  page 7).

Redefine can be used to remove names from all selected objects and then reapplied to selected objects only.

Help... is the first place to look for context-sensitive help.

NOTE: If you find all this confusing, take heart. It is one of the hardest parts of any application I have ever tried to write about. Maybe together, we can make some sense of it. Rumor has it that your editor (I think that's me, but who knows?) is not the only one confused by the Name Gallery, and that Xara is rethinking it for the next release. We can only hope this is true.