Hi Richard,

I was also disappointed to see XaraLX forum closed. I moved to Ubuntu and then Kubuntu 8.10 in October and I updated flawlessly to Kubuntu 9.04 two days ago (It's even smoother and quicker).

About Inkscape I began to design svg filters last summer and in January Inkscape developers community asked me to join the program development with my work on these filters.

About Drop shadow it's included in svg filters. However in 0.46 it has a sort of bug : the shadow had a white tint, like a glow ! This specific filter has it's own interface a little bit like Xara's Live Effects. Afterwards you can open what is now called Filters Editor (in Devel versions, see below) and change the settings there. Of course this way isn't so interactive than Xara's way, but Filters Editor is extremely powerful ; together with the XML Editor it allows to change things in depth by modifying directly the Filters svg code. There you can even build your own filters from scratch, or add and combine several existing filters. That's how I do to design the new Filters tool set.

It's true that Inkscape rendering is not so fast than the fantastic Xara's one. But I can say that it has progressed a lot with the development versions. I hope it will become a priority next year (perhaps then 2010 Google Summer of Code will be helpful). Then they will have already some feedback from Inkscape 0.47 daily users and I am sure they will ask for more speed !

I very often use XaraLX to import and layout the png images exported from Inkscape. And I continue to use XXPro4 on XP afterwards for many tasks.

I don't know if you did try to install Inkscape Devel Win32 snapshots on your computer. They are updated almost daily and they always get the last version of my filters. You will find them at this address : http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/

But at the moment I went on this page I saw they removed all builds after 06 April (I don't know why they did it but I know they are now in the last bug hunting phase before 0.47 release). As the filters have greatly evolved from this time you could download here the last version of the filters.svg file : http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/...share/filters/ On Ubuntu it must replace the one in your usr/share/inkscape-devel/filters.

Otherwise you can also install the last Inkscape-Devel build for Ubuntu which is here : https://launchpad.net/~inkscape-nightly/+archive/ppa It's not recent but it works for most tasks and this is the one I use to design my filters. If you are on 9.04 simply add these two complete lines (not only the links) to your updates sources :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape-nightly/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape-nightly/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Today I finally did some sort of "Poster Edge" filter. But I think I will work a little bit more on it in next hours.

Enjoy !

ivan