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Xara users know how fast Xara is compared to all other vector drawing applications. Well, the fastest just got faster! The examples listed above are a few of the key areas of speed improvement. Rendering and printing functions speeds have been improved as well.
The blend shown above is a 999-step blend. I selected the figure 8 shaped path and pressed the Blend Along a Curve icon on the Infobar. Before I could blink my eyes the blend was attached. And look how smooth the transition of the blend shapes and colors is. That's the beauty of Xara's Anti-aliasing engine. In earlier versions, dragging or resizing a complex like this was not a pretty site! But in Xtreme, it's like dragging or resizing a solid object. And it's the same for complex groups of objects. You really have to see it to believe it. I was amazed.
A new plug-in architecture allows for new filters to be added by Xara or by 3rd parties. The new Adobe PDF (*.pdf) export filter is a good example of this technology. (Xara is still making some last minute adjustments to the PDF export filter and it might not make the release date. If it is not included, as soon as the new filter is ready for action, owners will be able to download and install it in seconds). The list of file types now pops up (or down depending where the dialog is on the page) showing more filters at a glance and making it easier to select.
The new PDF filter offers many exciting features that should make Xara users very happy indeed. In the past, gradient fills had to be broken into a series of tiny shapes. Or in the worst case, converted to bitmaps. Selecting the PDF 1.4 option now creates true vector gradient fills and this is really cool, transparency, even gradient transparency is output as pure vectors. One of the benefits of this technology is smaller file size. You also get ultra-clean scalable resolution independent PDF files. This is really big news.
While we are on the subject of the PDF export filter. As of Illustrator version 9.0, PDF has been the Illustrator default file format. And as a lot of us know, getting our Xara files into later versions for Illustrator has been something less than a sure thing. A complex Xara file exported as PDF opens very nicely in Illustrator. From Xara Xtreme to PDF to Adobe Illustrator. The file shown above on the right was exported to PDF which was then opened in Illustrator 10.0 shown above right.
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