V15 Release Notes
You can find full details on all the new features and content in our V15 Release Notes.Performance Enhancements
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer now takes advantage of the power of 64 bit, if your computer supports it, enabling you to create larger, more content rich documents.What's more it now also supports multi-core processors. Xara always had by far the highest performing graphics rendering engine - now with support for multi-core processors it's even faster. Tests show approximate speed gains of 40% for dual core processors with large screen images and greater gains with more cores. Large full screen photos can render up to 75% faster on a dual core processor.
Auto Resize Documents
A brand new 'auto-fit' capability that enables you to create flexible documents that adapt to almost any size change you or your customer might want. It's a great time saver!For example you can now easily change a design from A3 to A4, or A4 to US Letter. It's especially useful for social media, where you can adapt a design from (for example) Facebook into Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram by simply changing page types.
The default position is for all items on a page to be automatically re-positioned when you change the page size, but Designer actually offers a great deal of flexibility if you want to control exactly how particular items in your design behave.
New Templates
- Many new social media templates for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr
View previews of a selection of the themes and other templates in the Online Content Catalog.
Import & Export
- PDF import improvements
- PDF export improvements
- NEW: Support for PDF/X export
- NEW: Support for JPEG XR import
Color Separations and CMYK 16-bit Support
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer now supports the conversion of RGB, HSV and grayscale colors to CMYK, and offers detailed imagesetting controls, for professional commercial printing.This adds 2 new tabs to the Print > Options dialog. One for Imagesetting and the other for Separations.
The Imagesetting dialog gives control over printer's marks and film settings and the Separations dialog gives control over color separations and PostScript printer settings.
Live copies
You can now create multiple ‘Live Copies’ of an object - vector or photo - on a page or pages, and they all update when one is edited. It’s still possible to apply transformations such as skew, scale or rotate independently. A powerful feature and a great time saver (sometimes called ‘Live Clone’).Text Handling Improvements
- You can now create Text Styles for bulleted and numbered lists, including all the list properties you might need - from indents to bullet symbols and colors
- Extra controls over objects anchored to your text flow
- Text in text panels can now be top aligned, center aligned or bottom aligned
- Right click > Replace option for symbols inside groups
- New document language property for the spell checker
- The font type is now shown in the font menu (usually OpenType or Truetype)
New SmartShapes
SmartShapes are an amazingly quick and easy way to create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes. We've made some great new additions to the Online Content Catalog library of these ultra-editable ready-made shapes:
- A selection of new Text Panels, in Print & Web Components > Text Panels
- New Flowline SmartShapes (in arrows)
Custom Keyboard Shortcut Configuration
This handy new utility provides an easy and direct way to configure key shortcuts. It allows you to define a shortcut for a command which doesn't have a shortcut by default, or to change a command's shortcut. You'll find it in the Utilities menu > Customize Key Shortcuts.Scribble Selection
There's a new option in the Selector Tool that many people find the quickest and easiest way to select multiple objects: Simply drag with "Alt" held down and instead of dragging a box, a freehand line is draw. Every object that is touched by the line becomes selected. Hence you can drag the mouse around the page, touching all the objects that you want to select.Tables
Tables have topped the list of feature requests for some time, and in v15 we've taken the first important steps with our first Table SmartShapes.V15 tables support basic table insertion and editing, including adding & removing columns, resizing rows & columns, various table formatting options and auto formatting of the table to fit contents. You'll find the new tables in the Online Content Catalog under Components > Print & Web Components > Tables.
Text Flow Inside Shapes
You can now place text inside shapes so that it flows within the shape's outline - a great new feature that'll enable you to create some interesting and eye catching designs.The Online Content Catalog incudes some new text panels that make use of this new feature (See Components > Print & Web Components > Text Panels).
Import & Export
- Further PDF import improvements
Resizeable Photo Grids
Photo Grids were introduced in v12 and they're a cool way to display your photos. Not surprisingly they've proved popular, so we've enhanced them in v15 by making the (formerly static) Photo Grids easily resizeable. The defaults are set to common sizes such as 19:9, but once you've added them to your document you can easily change the width and height to make them any size and aspect ratio you like.
You can find the Photo Grids in Components > Image Resources > Photo Grids.
New SmartShapes
SmartShapes are an amazingly quick and easy way to create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes. We've made some great new additions to the Online Content Catalog library of these ultra-editable ready-made shapes:
- Table SmartShapes (in Components > Print & Web Components > Tables)
- Text panels with text flowing inside (in Components > Print & Web Components > Text Panels)
- A selection of new resizeable text panels and photo text panels
We will soon be offering a public API for SmartShapes for anyone interested in developing their own (programmed in Javascript).
New Templates
- A selection of social media graphics for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram
View previews of a selection of the themes and other templates in the Online Content Catalog.
New SmartShapes
SmartShapes are an amazingly quick and easy way to create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes. We've made some great new additions to the Online Content Catalog library of these ultra-editable ready-made shapes:
- 4 new Tables in Print & Web Components > Tables
- A selection of new Text Panels, also in Print & Web Components - 21 Smart Layouts (more complex and interesting Text Panel SmartShapes), 5 Text in Shapes, 1 Smart Object, 1 Text in SmartShapes
Other New Templates
- New Social Media graphics (Company, Food Delivery, Security)
View previews of a selection of the themes and other templates in the Online Content Catalog.