V16 Release Notes
You can find full details on all the new features and content in our V16 Release Notes.Chart Improvements
Some major enhancements to chart support, including the long awaited introduction of Line Charts. Plus we've added some very flexible new controls over the appearance of bar & column charts.
New Content
The latest additions to the Online Content Catalog give you lots of new options for displaying your data and spreading your message:- 4 line charts for this new category in the Online Content Catalog.
- Social media templates: Be prepared for the busiest times of the social media year with our new selection of holiday templates for Facebook and Instagram.
Heading Backgrounds
A quick and easy way to add a background color to your text that fills the full width of the text column, great for headings and highlighting text. And since it’s a popular style in Microsoft Word and Google Docs it means even better results when importing documents in that format.
Other
- Xara supports an exceptionally wide range of formats which we're constantly working to improve. This release includes updates to PDF, Word and Powerpoint import and SVG import and export (more info in the Release Notes).
- The InfoBar in the Selector tool now shows the current angle of rotation of a selected object.
- Some new time-saving text selection shortcuts: in the Text Tool double-click drag to select whole words, triple-click drag to select whole lines of text, quadruple-click drag to select whole paragraphs. Drag works backwards or forwards.
- A requested enhancement to the SmartFields feature first released in June; we've added a new option to the Link dialog that allows you to select a SmartField as a target for a link. Plus there is now support for text & link pairs.
- New in Options > General: select 'improve editability of imported docs' and Web Designer will auto-create color themes and text styles to match commonly used colors and styles in your imported Word, Powerpoint and PDF docs.
Scale to Fit Width
The new ‘scale to fit width’ option smoothly scales your content within each web variant. It reduces the number of variants you need to create but at the same time ensures a better result for a wider variety of devices, and a smoother, more fluid transition within variants.Try it for yourself by adjusting the browser width on our demo site 1 and demo site 2.
Shrink Text on Overflow
Another variation of our popular time-saving text auto-fit feature. The new option automatically shrinks text to fit only when it starts to overflow the text area. And if you delete text, so it fits in the text area again, the point size will revert to the original size.
New Content
The latest additions to the Online Content Catalog give you lots of new options for showcasing the most important text and images in your site:- 2 Photo Frames
- 5 Smart Photo Frames (you can customize the shapes)
- 7 Photo Panels
- 9 Text Panels
- 6 Labeled Lines
Smart Fields
Another great time saver: Configure a Smart Field for any repeating text string in your document that’s likely to change, and then you’ll only have to update its value once, in the Smart Field dialog. For example, you might create a Smart Field called ‘price’ or ‘link to offer’.
Enhanced SVG Export
You can now export individual images in SVG format, a great option for web graphics: smaller and faster to load than jpegs or pngs, with no loss of quality when you scale. It also adds another choice for file interchange with other graphic programs.
Other
Additional improvements to PDF import.Advanced Open Type Support
Most Open Type fonts include stylized characters that allow you to add interest and impact to your text. It could be a flourish that adds a certain elegance, or a simple and bold text effect that draws attention to a key statement.
Used successfully they are a sure sign of a professional designer, and will make your design eye-catching and memorable.
Specifically, we have added support for:
- Swashes - decorative or ornamental characters with a flourish
- Stylistic Alternates - alternative designs for particular characters in the font, purely for aesthetic or design effect
- Titling Alternates - alternate characters that look best at a bigger size, so often (but not necessarily) used in headings & titles
We have also made some significant performance improvements.
Smart Layouts
Text Panels
A large selection of new and very flexible text panels - the best way to highlight important text in a range of documents from brochures to websites.
Plus all Text Panels now support vertical alignment and text auto-fit.
Photo Panels and Frames
More than 30 new photo panels and a new category of photo frames, offering a host of new options for displaying your images to best effect – one of the most common requirements for all forms of document design.
Usability Improvements
- Fast Line Width Control: Change line width by simply scrolling the mousewheel over the line or shape outline (with Ctrl+Shift) - a quick, easy and interactive way to edit your lines. A small usability improvement that’ll save you a lot of time!
- Vertical alignment control has been moved to the Text Tool InfoBar
- By default Groups are now treated as separate objects when exporting to HTML
Other
- Cookie consent guide (support article): A new guide that takes the pain out of adding a cookie consent banner to your website, with full control over text, position, layout, color, ‘learn more’ link and compliance model.
- Significant improvements to PDF and Powerpoint import
New SmartShapes
More than 30 new ultra-editable SmartShapes, including trapezoid and parallelogram - geometric shapes that are popular building blocks for designs from brochures and flyers to cards and websites. We've also added braces (brackets).
Smart Labeled Lines
Really smart lines! The line length adjusts as you enter a label, and if it’s a valid measurement unit it will set the line length. Great for headings & dividers, labels for technical drawings and floating rulers!
Tables
Basic tables were introduced in v15 but they've taken a big steps forward in v16.
Like all SmartShapes editing is visual and interactive: you can use simple drag and drop to arrange the table, add or remove columns, adjust the width and height of rows and columns or the whole table, re-arrange rows, adjust spacing and cell padding. It's now an ultra-flexible table tool. Improvements include:
- Can now apply style changes to a selection inside a table
- All text and All border options added to the replace color list when changing multiple colors. Plus other improvements to the color editor when used with tables
- Shift + drag on table width/height handles stretches the table around its center
- Improved border positioning and border formatting
- Now supports repositioning of row/columns that have merged cells
- Performance improvements
Tables v2
Basic tables were introduced in v15 but they've taken a big step forward with this release.Like all SmartShapes editing is visual and interactive: you can use simple drag and drop to arrange the table, add or remove columns, adjust the width and height of rows and columns or the whole table, re-arrange rows, adjust spacing and cell padding. It's now an ultra-flexible table tool.
Improvements include the ability to paste tab delimited text data into your table, better border control, cell merging and un-merging, improved selection options and inner & outer padding controls. See the Release Notes for full details.
Open Type Improvements
We first introduced Open Type ligature support last year, but we've made some significant improvements in v16 including dynamic previews of ligature, stylistic sets and text capitalization, and support for contextual ligatures and contextual alternates. The net result is that you can introduce some beautiful and interesting decorative text into your pages.Enhanced Pie Charts
Pie Charts are a new addition to the Charts category. These offer a super-easy way to create high quality vector pie charts. Designer will even automatically calculate the correct percentages for each pie slice!Like all SmartShapes there are some very flexible editing options:
- You can adjust the pie segments by dragging the handles, entering the figures or pasting CSV data
- You can display values as percentage or absolute
- It will automatically position the labels around the pie
- You can 'pull out' sections to highligh important data
- Segment colors are taken from theme colors or a color of your choice
Auto-Fitting Text
A powerful and time-saving new option that automatically resizes your text to 'best fit' into any shape. Forget about manually adjusting your font size, just turn on the new auto fit feature and type away - what you type will be automatically re-sized to fit. What's more it works with mixed font sizes, maintaining the relative size, and it even works with repelling borders!New Case Options
You now have lots of new case options easily available to you - including initial caps, small caps, all caps and lower case. You'll find them in the Advanced Text Toolbar under Text Capitalization. Simply apply them like other text settings such as bold and italic. Another great time-saver!Other Text Handling Improvements
- You can now include embedded graphics in Repeating text such as headers and footers, and anchor objects to that text
Import & Export
- There have been some significant improvements in PDF import, Word import & export and PowerPoint import - see the Release Notes for full details
- NEW: Presentations can now be exported as PowerPoint files (.pptx) (beta)
Color Palette from Photos
A common professional trick is to tie the document colors to colors used within a key photo in that document.Normally this is a pretty time consuming, manual process. Web Designer now includes a powerful new tool that will analyse a photo, identify the pre-dominant colors in that image, and create a color palette of those colors with the names Theme Color 1 to Theme Color 5. By using those Theme Colors in your document, and linked shades of those colors, you can quickly and easily give your document a harmonious, professional look.
Try it yourself with our demo doc!
'Website M' Hosting
Web Designer Premium includes ‘Website M’ hosting (worth \$1.99 a month), free for one year. This includes 2GBytes of free web hosting space and one free domain name (e.g. yourname.com or .co.uk or .de etc). Plus if you publish with Website M you can password protect your web pages.
Improved Arrows
Arrows are one of the most popular elements in the entire Content Catalog, which is why we've built Arrow SmartShapes into one of the most flexible and easy-to-use arrow tools to be found.We've made some significant improvements to the Arrow SmartShapes, see the Release Notes for full details. And we have a selection of the new Arrow SmartShape designs in the Content Catalog: Insert > Shape > Arrows to give them a try.
New Templates & SmartShapes
- 4 new Pie Charts in Components > Print & Web Components > Charts
- 2 new Smart Tables in Components > Print & Web Components > Tables
- 6 new Arrow designs in Components > Print & Web Components > Arrows
You can view previews of a selection of the themes and other templates in the Online Content Catalog.
Web Designer benefits from seamless integration with Xara Cloud, which makes it a great additional service.
Xara Cloud is an ultra-simple way to edit and share your Xara websites online in a web browser, using any computer or tablet. The Premium version of Xara Cloud also gives you the ability to work on Xara sites or Xara Cloud templates (including print templates) in collaboration with friends, colleagues and clients, commenting and editing together in real-time.
Xara Cloud is being constantly enhanced, and new features are made available as and when they are ready - you can find news of the very latest updates here.
You can find out more about the Free and Premium Xara Cloud options & register here.
