Xara vs Adobe vs et al

[eugenetyson]

Well, I have been looking at Xara lately. I have never used it. Just looked at it from a far. Then went up close and poked with a stick, used marigold gloves to turn it over and read some of the information. I feel kinda dirty for looking at it, and I don't know why.

I reckon this weekend I'll download a trial of it.

But I'm interested in hearing people's views who have used Xara in the past or presently. And especially those who use both Xara and Adobe products, or Corel etc. And what the main differences, flaws and anything you can think of.

I'm not looking for a complete switch over.

But I would also like to use Xara some day for a real project. I'm not sure why. I'm just interested in this stuff and always interested in page layout software.



Here's the Xara site:
http://www.xara.com/us/

And in the interest of fairness
http://www.adobe.com/
http://www.corel.com/international.html

[PrintDriver]

Just be sure you use it for a project in a format that your printer will enjoy. And understand too that it is not well supported. If something goes wrong with your pdf, you're on your own.

[eugenetyson]

Oh I understand that.

Anyone have any issues with PDFs that they don't get with Adobe or Corel?

[PrintDriver]

The only things I've ever seen from Xara are illustrations, most as .tif. Sorry.

[digizan]

Maybe crazy wabbit (http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/member.php?u=20661) will chime in. I know him from the About.com forum and he's a huge Xara fan.

Digi

[eugenetyson]

Cool thanks. Hopefully someone uses Xara round here :)

I didn't even get a chance to try it out at the weekend. Perhaps next weekend or even during the week?

[Callendale]

Hi Eugene,

Just checking in to see if Crazy Wabbit had been here yet. I'm curious what he has to say about it. I've got extreme pro, but have yet to use it for a real project. I normally use CorelDraw and Photoshop, sometimes Illustrator. I find it easier to do free-hand drawing in Xara than in Corel or Illustrator, but haven't done anything else with it. It is very easy to learn. Supposedly, it works well with other programs:

http://www.xara.com/us/products/xtreme/features/

Did you see the work samples in the gallery?

http://site.xara.com/gallery/artist.asp?artist=business

Callie

[Audentia]

Do I live in a hole in the ground? I have NEVER heard of this program in my life...
*toddles over to check it out*
But gotta tell you that the industry standard is where my agency stays and where I am loyal... so I'm with Adobe all the way.

[hewligan]

Just be sure you use it for a project in a format that your printer will enjoy. And understand too that it is not well supported. If something goes wrong with your pdf, you're on your own.

You know, this is one of the things that makes me sad.

PDF is an open specification. Many of the alternative programs actually have better support for PDF, as described in the specs, than Adobe's applications. And yet the tools used by printers just expect a PDF as produced by Adobe's applications - including the things they get wrong.

It must be really good to be Adobe...

[PrintDriver]

You have to remember, I'm in a weird corner of the print industry. PDFs are not widely accepted in the work I do, mainly for color reasons but others as well. We can't support and maintain rips for every freeware or shareware out there on top of the tenfold numbers of media we carry. If something becomes fairly popular, and they do occasionally, we'll pick it up and try to make it work. PC-only programs haven't gotten there with the design crowd. As I've said, I've seen .tifs from Xara provided by illustrators. The only reason I knew they were using Xara was they called for formatting and resolution info. Quite honestly, I haven't even seen a Corel file in over 8 years. And only one Quark project in the last two. Definitely grand to be Adobe these days. And they can suck too. NO question about that. ;)

[Callendale]

This is what Xara has to say:

Xara Xtreme offers industry leading export of super-clean, very compact PDF files (including support for graduated color fills and flat / graduated transparency). Combined with the PDF import feature, this provides another way to interchange files.

[hewligan]

You have to remember, I'm in a weird corner of the print industry. PDFs are not widely accepted in the work I do, mainly for color reasons but others as well.

That's true, but it really is a problem that even in the more common world of print, where PDF is the lingua franca, we really only seem to mean "PDFs created by some form of Adobe Software." As I said before, PDF is an open standard, and it just shouldn't work like that.

We can't support and maintain rips for every freeware or shareware out there on top of the tenfold numbers of media we carry. If something becomes fairly popular, and they do occasionally, we'll pick it up and try to make it work. PC-only programs haven't gotten there with the design crowd. As I've said, I've seen .tifs from Xara provided by illustrators. The only reason I knew they were using Xara was they called for formatting and resolution info. Quite honestly, I haven't even seen a Corel file in over 8 years. And only one Quark project in the last two.

Yeah, but Xara's not some minor little open source project that someone started and then got bored with halfway through development. The software's been around for about 15 years, and the company has been developing software for nearly 30 years. And, you know what? I've never even tried it.

Definitely grand to be Adobe these days. And they can suck too. NO question about that. ;)

I actually think that Adobe, for the most part, produces some very good quality software. Yes, there are problems, but when I compare it to the software that comes from most of the other major software companies, they look pretty damn good.

But I can't help wondering if there were more competition, maybe I wouldn't be paying quite so much. I also worry that, as they seem to have quite successfully killed off the competition in the professional market, they have a lot less motivation to maintain the quality of the software.

In the end, monopolies are only ever good for monopolists.

[eugenetyson]

And, you know what? I've never even tried it.



Do you think you'll give it a test drive any time soon?

I'm gonna do it over the weekend. I don't have a real project to try it on. But I have some old ones in InDesign, so I might see what sort of hiccups arise.

[PrintDriver]

I've never tried it either. Mostly cuz I don't have a PC at home and I don't have time when at work.

It's not that it hasn't been around for years. It's demand. If I suddenly got a dozen files from a dozen different designers all using Xara, first I'd say WTF!, then I'd have to bone up and get the thing working. Or find an export function from it that does work with the various work flows I'm hooked into.

The ones that worry me a bit are the really stupid ones like Acrylic, et al, that thumb their noses at print conventions in the interests of desktop printer output and generally have operators with no clue.

At the rate of slide I've seen in the GD industry the past 10 years, I'd better start boning up on those too. :p

[Syphon]

I don't know what the complains are about PDFs from Adobe applications. They are far, far better than the ones I get from our clients who don't know how to make a PDF in any application.

[hewligan]

Yeah, I only have a Mac at home, too. Still, apparently Xara have released open source versions of their software for Mac and Linux. I might give it a try when i have more time, but that probably won't be soon.

Also, Syphon, if your clients don't know how to make a PDF, then the can't possibly make a PDF that has a problem, surely?

But the problem is simple. There is a specification as to how a PDF document should work. Adobe often fail to follow it. This means that their PDFs work just fine as long as you're working with Adobe applications, or other software that is specifically designed to deal with PDFs produced by Adobe software. But you frequently find problems when you use software that actually behaves correctly according to the specification.

See also: What's wrong with Internet Explorer - because it's the same problem.

[Broacher]

Footnote: my kid brother (the computer programmer) worked under contract with Xara guys on their last major upgrade. Most of what he did had to do with getting the PDF stuff implemented.

Got a lot of question filled phone calls about that part. And I learned a little bit more about the public PDF standard too. For instance, something seriously different happened between AI9 and AI10.

I got to play around with some of the beta's for a bit but it was a very busy project time for me, so I didn't take it through all the test drives I wanted to. Still, from an illustration standpoint, it's freaking fast and has a lot of neat stuff in it.

Xara was always built around their transparency code-- they were the pioneers in this area with blazingly fast stuff that nobody came close to matching for years. Corel actually made a very sweet deal with the Xara gang way back in version 6 and it took the Adobe crew a long time to catch up (mostly by an end-run 'cheat': they just changed the Postscript standard to handle a kind of faux transparency support).

So in a strong, but indirect way, Xara coders were responsible for the world of transparency software we work with today.

The jury is still split between crowning and hanging them for that.

[PrintDriver]

The jury is still split between crowning and hanging them for that.
I was just getting ready to write that as I read your post. :)

Broacher are you talking about a difference between Illustrator v9 and v10?

Cuz v9 was a seriously hurting puppy, and the first version to use transparency. The thing gave us all kinds of print troubles. Coupled with Pantone's decision to 'update' their color palette at the same time and it was a crazy 8 or so months.

[Broacher]

Yeah, but Adobe did something in the AI9 PDF format that they dropped after that. I wish I could remember what it was exactly, but it was a crucial thing for my brother to uncover while he was working out the transparency to process colour stuff in Xara. Something Adobe came up with to do with the flattening process and some kind of colour space that they was jury-rigged to accommodate transparency... or something like that. Sorry, this was a few years back.