working with Xara and page layout software

[davelash]

What's the best way to integrate Xara with page layout software?

I do business graphics of many types in my business consulting practice. Visio has been my primary tool, but I am excited to discover Xara and look forward to working with it.

I have used PageMaker occasionally for many years and have recently been reading about Microsoft Publisher.

My documents are 20 to 50 pages of either 8.5x11 or 18x24. In the past, I've either Inserted Visio objects into a Word doc (forcing it to act as page layout software) or tried to do the whole doc in Visio. Altho Visio allows multiple pages, it was never intended for this use and the file size and speed gets quickly out of hand.

I'd like to be able to pick an easy page layout tool that would allow me to insert Xara, Visio, or Excel graphic objects...and let me see them and even edit them while I'm working in page layout mode.

Is this a viable approach? Can you recommend a page layout tool that would work well? Any tips on how best to proceed?

Many thanks,

Dave

[davelash]

What's the best way to integrate Xara with page layout software?

I do business graphics of many types in my business consulting practice. Visio has been my primary tool, but I am excited to discover Xara and look forward to working with it.

I have used PageMaker occasionally for many years and have recently been reading about Microsoft Publisher.

My documents are 20 to 50 pages of either 8.5x11 or 18x24. In the past, I've either Inserted Visio objects into a Word doc (forcing it to act as page layout software) or tried to do the whole doc in Visio. Altho Visio allows multiple pages, it was never intended for this use and the file size and speed gets quickly out of hand.

I'd like to be able to pick an easy page layout tool that would allow me to insert Xara, Visio, or Excel graphic objects...and let me see them and even edit them while I'm working in page layout mode.

Is this a viable approach? Can you recommend a page layout tool that would work well? Any tips on how best to proceed?

Many thanks,

Dave

[stlewis]

Dave

You can use Word just the same. The one fly in the ointment is you cannot use Paste Special/Link. So if you use the same diagram/pic in two places, you are in a spot of difficulty. I like to keep all my pics in standalone files and embed/link them; you can't do this with XaraX.

[cazza42]

Dave,

have a look at the Serif line of products. I regularly take work done in xara and put it into Page Plus, the page layout program. In fact I am illustrating my mums' life story and the whole book is being done this way.

Carol leather

P.S. Serifs programs are good, and cheap!

[gwpriester]

Ventura Publisher (Corel) is good for long documents.

I don't recommend Word for long documents. It is just not designed for that use and is slow and clunky.

Adobe InDesign (the next giant step up from PageMaker) is the state of the art application and has over taken QuarkXPress as the preferred publishing application in the profesional design business. InDesign also comes with a migration package to help PageMaker users make the change. Adobe is not going to develop PageMaker beyon the current version but they will continue to support it.

As for getting images from Xara into whatever you use to publish depends upon what kinds of images you are creating. Simple vector graphics can be saved as Xara *.eps (Encapsulated PostScript) files which can be placed and scaled to any size and are device dependent for printing resolution. EPS files will print to the maximum resolution of the output device.

TIFF files are another alternative. TIFF images are bitmaps and cannot be scaled up very much without a loss in image quality, but used same size and at the output resolution (300-600dpi) will place and print fine in any publishing application. A TIFF file will be larger in terms of kilobytes, especially at higher resolutions because every pixel of the image needs to be defined in terms of RGB or CMYK components. But text and image quality will be as good as what you see in Xara. TIFF files are good for images with shadows, bevels, and some of Xara's more complex effects.

Hope this helps.

Gary

[masque]

I'm only adding my opinion to this as your predicament is similar to one I came across earlier this year with a local charity.
They produce a lot of literature outlining their aims, requirements as well as reports etc. and were advised to buy a full set of Adobe software to produce their illustrations and page layouts inhouse. Apart from nearly bankrupting them they got into a complete mess and produced nothing and through an aquaintance came to me for assistance, not always a good idea but this time it paid off.
As they wanted to do it themselves as much as possible for budget reasons, I recommended serif's page plus and xara.
Graphics produced in Xara imported as CMYK tiffs to Pageplus which is then output as PDF to be passed on to their printer. They were doing in a day work that they had been struggling over with Quark or Adobe for weeks previously and are now producing high quality glossy print to put across their aims and intentions.
I think that Serif say's themself that their Software will do 80% of what the big names will do for 20% of the price and I find that the 20% it won't do won't be missed by the majority of users.
Alternativly to all the above I could have just said I agree with Carol but I've just had a new keyboard.

derek

[diniel]

They're up to v9 of Serif PagePlus but you can download v5 for free at http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/serif/pp/pp5/index.asp

v9 is listed online as costing US$135, but on the free v5 download page you can upgrade to v6 for $9.95. I don't think that anything before v8 has a PDF export, but for free or $10, it's worth a look. You might get a better price on v9 as an upgrade from v5/6 as well: one thing Serif are good at (at least in the UK) is sending never-ending upgrade offers through the post and email.

[masque]

Version 8 before you get built in pdf export.

derek

[diniel]

Speak of the devil: I got an email this morning for a reduced price upgrade to Pageplus v10 - GBP49 compared to the list price of GBP99.

[amoore]

As Gary says. Word is not a good idea when it comes to publishing. Aside from being slow and clunky, it's also unreliable. Besides, it spends its time (and wastes yours) telling you what it wants to do instead of doing what you want to do.

Re Microsoft Publisher, if you're only interested in plugging some information into a prepackaged format, you may find it useful. Beyond that, it's clunky, difficult and outputs huge files.

InDesign is brilliant on fine typography, and as Gary says, it's taken the place of Quark as the industry standard. However, there are a number of features it still doesn't have, which you may or may not need.

Avoid Quark like the plague. It's difficult, inflexible and ridiculously expensive.

Serif PagePlus is very nice and very inexpensive. Certainly worth taking a look.

OTOH, at 20 to 50 pages, you're talking about long documents. I wouldn't consider anything but Corel Ventura for those. You'll be able to automate aspects of production that will cut your effort substantially. You can associate the graphics without embedding them, edit them in their native applications and see the results immediately in Ventura. Keeping the graphics external also helps keep the file size down and processing speed up. Ventura 10 lists Visio as an import format. I've never used it, so I don't know anything about specs or version numbers.

Corel Ventura is a hidden gem (all puns intended). It's not just for long documents. I've used it for every kind of print material for years. In general, it offers a lot more bang for the buck than the competition, in a more intuitive and usable package. People I know who make their living working with all the DTP apps say that in most instances they can produce the same document in Ventura in a fraction of the time it takes in another app.

BTW, Ventura is supported by a very friendly and highly knowledgeable newsgroup, much like this one. Makes a big difference in your experience of the application.http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif