Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features

[Ben Wiens]

I recently installed the Xara Designer Pro+ trial after researching features in up to 200 different programs over a span of 34 years and am interested in the V20 option. I want a Swiss Arm Knife program that can be used both for my scientific illustrated note taking all the way up to desktop publishing for a book. I think Xara Designer Pro+ was developed with such a thinking in mind which is why I became quite excited about it when for some reason I only came to know of it recently. But so far there are some features I can't find and so they either don't exist or I can't find them even after doing a lot of searching in forums and Xara literature and Help files. I want to take or write notes in this program as it's the only multi page capable program that in the same program can do quality Bezier illustrations, can edit raster images, has text styles, can have objects moving with text, has a small file size, and is reliable. Microsoft OneNote has poor illustration and text flow capability, Adobe Illustrator has 1 page capability and huge file sizes, CorelDRAW or Corel Designer can't have objects move with text, and Samsung Notes doesn't have Bezier curves and can't be used on non Samsung computers. I also would like to do desktop publishing with the program as it would be great to reuse some of the graphics from my notes in the book and Adobe Indesign really only works well with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop and the subscription costs of their programs is very high and the file sizes very large. I studied the history behind the xar file type which seems interesting as theoretically it can be quite compact.

(1) File size: I might make 100,000 separate notes in my lifetime and am looking to make Xara Designer Pro+ into a note taking program which I'm envisioning would be an illustrated multipage capable Zettelkasten system on steroids with each note being a separate file. File size is important then. I noticed in my tests that 1 page or 3,103 characters of text is 35 K (kilobytes) with the Times New Roman 10 pt font but only 12.4 K with 2 pt text. I had an expert look inside the xar file format and it seems there is a large preview bitmap in the file, perhaps it is the 256x256 32 K bitmap that shows up in the sidebar. I can't find any setting to disable it? If it would be disabled there is a chance of 5.8 K with 1 page or 3,103 characters of text which would be the same as the very efficient Samsung Notes file format.

(2) Externally linked images: To do a book of 50-800 pages all the graphic files need to be externally linked, otherwise the program will bog down generally. I can't seem to find a way of externally linking graphic files, does it exist? Perhaps the best question is, what is the maximum practical pages of a Xara Designer Pro+ file with 2 vector illustrations per page?

(3) Equation editor: For scientific and engineering documents, an equation editor is needed, something that is OLE or integral to the program. Xara Designer Pro+ doesn't have it's own equation editor like Corel Designer and I can't figure out a way of doing OLE with MathType, I can only paste it in which can't be edited.

(4) Print on demand book printing: Is the Commercial printing PDF/X 300 dpi images what Amazon print on demand books will accept and is it acceptable quality for color printing?

[handrawn]

my gut feeling is you are asking too much of the program, but others who know it better may have some methodolgy

[Acorn]

Ben, welcome to TalkGraphics. I like a challenge.

1. There is no large preview image in any Xara design file. There is a 32kB Bitmap in the Bitmap Gallery. This is not used in any design unless you explicitly copy it in. It is in the program, not the design, or on any rendered output. XPro+ rendered page backgrounds use CSS with <span> Tags or SVG fills so anything like this is tens of bytes..
I used the A-4 1-column template with Opens Sans 10pt. I created 6 pages of text (22,000 chars) and the design file was 60kB. Each rendered HTML page was 10kB. I would use multiple paged design files and treat each page as one file equivalent. I'll cover how many pages per design file later on. The overheads of rendering obviously share the other required assets (JS, CSS, WOFF). So if you have 100k files your design files would be 1GB. If you rendered all out to HTML or PDF then another 1GB.

2. It is relative easy to link to external images. You create a Placeholder and make it Repel text under. Then you include an HTML <img> Tag with src to the external file. If you want to see the actual image in the design, you would Re-generate the Placeholder.; an image smaller in size (probably) to the original would appear and become part of the design file size. Unticked, there is no overhead. It depends if you need to see the image in the design or only as rendered. Potentially, you could just drag your image in, apply its Image Filename and , crucially, Optimise Photo. The original is preserved but the design and render are kept at 192/96dpi. External linking to achieve 300dpi is clearly going to be the best for you.

3. I would search out a web widget such as MathJax. You add its code to your design website head and put your editable equation into another Placeholder.

4. PDF/X 300dpi is more than adequate.

For books 50 - 800 pages, I would split into sections/chapters of up to 100 pages. Export as PDF/X and use a utility to merge the sections/chapters into your book. I have handled 500-page designs without images and Xara barely copes. Its newest version may, I have not checked.

If you choose to isolate each file then you loose the power of linkage.
I would chuck/gather themed content into a multi-page design file, where, for little overhead, you can hyperlink easily across pages. With a little effort, your links can cross into other rendered chunks, making a cohesive whole.

An alternative is to change your text files into MarkDown files. You get the benefit of using a plain text editor but display as HTML and print to PDF.
I would use something like GitHub where you can have your own private repository. I use similar but self-hosted with Datenstrom Yellow but your project is probably too big for that.

Acorn

[handrawn]

...I like a challenge...

rather though you would

[gwpriester]

Ben - Welcome to TalkGraphics

I have been using Xara since 1995. I have also produced over a dozen paperback books, all fiction, using Xara. And I have cursed a blue streak with every book because of simple features that should be part of the app but are not there. But I use Xara because I know it so well and even though there are many key features for DTP missing, I am able to work around the missing features.

Last year, I tried Affinity Publisher to recreate a book I had already produced just to see what the process and experience was. And I have to say, I wish I had used Affinity Publisher a long time ago.

It is created specifically for desk top publishing with sophisticated formatting options, and such simple but essential functions such as Master Pages. It took me a while to get up to speed and I relied heavily on Affinity's support page/community, who were knowledgeable, helpful, and quick to respond. I am pretty sure that most of the advanced features you are asking about are included and arranged in logical groups of related features in Affinity Publisher.

Xara is great for many things, and I use it daily to create and assemble my 3D stereograms. I cannot think how I could ever live without it.

But if you are going to the trouble of learning a new program, investigating Affinity Publisher would be well worth the time invested.

[handrawn]

added advantage of affinity is that, although vector/bitmap/publishing are three seperate programs, they all open each others file types [bit like adobe] so many operations are effectively seamless

I don't really do books, but affinity publisher is what it says on the tin; xara tries to be a bit of everything, and sadly often fails to be

[gwpriester]

+1

[Ben Wiens]

There is no large preview image in any Xara design file. There is a 32kB Bitmap in the Bitmap Gallery. This is not used in any design unless you explicitly copy it in. It is in the program, not the design, or on any rendered output. XPro+ rendered page backgrounds use CSS with <span> Tags or SVG fills so anything like this is tens of bytes. I used the A-4 1-column template with Opens Sans 10pt. I created 6 pages of text (22,000 chars) and the design file was 60kB.

The expert on file formats sent me a breakdown of a 5 character text document I created in Xara Designer Pro (see below attachment). The Total size of the file was 10,200 bytes (10.2 K) and looking inside there is a 6,497 byte (6.497 K) jpeg in it. Doing some of my own forensics, I found this file is not used by Windows 10 Taskbar preview, and it is not used by Xara Designer Pro Page and Layer Gallery, it is however used in Windows Explorer Preview Pane. While Microsoft Word documents are actually rendered from the file in Windows Explorer and you can scroll through all the pages, there is no such rendering available for Xara files and so guess the choice was the single jpeg preview bitmap per document.

By creating some files I came to the following conclusion. A xar file of a single US letter size document contains about 3.9 K page setup section, then a single color jpeg preview image averaging 44 K, then about 1.0 K for the actual text for a total of 48.9 K for the total file. So for a typical 1 page text document with 10 pt Open Sans text filling the whole page the text takes up about 2.08% of the total file. For a 12 page document the ratio is much better and the text now takes up 20% of the total file size.

Regarding the text in a xar file, it appears to be highly compressed, the 1 page of average 10 pt Open Sans text is 3,100 characters and Windows Notepad would save this as a 3.100 K file, so the text in xar files is compressed by a ratio of 3.103 times which is quite good for text.

I also did some tests with a complex vector letterhead which saved in Adobe Illustrator without compression at 1,000 K (1 Mb). I embedded this in a Xara Designer Pro document and came to the conclusion that the image only took 10.0 K which is 1% of the size of the Illustrator file, this is the same size of a svgz file which is the most compact file type in existence in my opinion but is not supported natively by many programs.

I'm very pleased with the small file space that text and vector graphics take in the xar file but was hoping that the preview jpeg image could be turned off for short documents? After more experiments I haven't found a way. Can it be turned off?

Attachment 134633

[Acorn]

Thank you for the analysis.

There are two aspects you can look into.
The first may be to create your own Template. When saving you can untick Show preview.
The second to to see if you can access the Xara .WIX format and export your page to that, deleting the original. When saving, you can exclude the Preview image. For me, a single character A4 file is 2,696B.

You originally mentioned the image file size was 32kB. You now are reporting TAG_PREVIEWBITMAP_JPEG with 6,497B.

At no point can I hit 49kB.

All this tells me is you should not be saving design files with only one page of text.
Offer up a 'page' from your website that we can dissect to see how well we can do.

Storage is cheap and single paging everything is not efficient for search and retrieval.
With a MarkDown system, I am able to render as HTML and directly edit the page contents through that render with none of the Xara 'overheads'.
It comes with a built-in search mechanism and is older than three years.

Acorn

[handrawn]

@Ben Wiens - your attachment in post #8 is invalid - have you deleted it ?