Xara Designer Pro+ Changelog

What's new in Xara Designer Pro+ 23.6.0.68432

Jan 18, 2024

Web Blocks:
Resize on live-share:
When new objects are live shared across all variants of a Responsive Website, each copy created now gets reduced in width so that it will be no wider than the page in each variant. So for example objects created and shared in the Main variant will be reduced in width in the Mobile variant, if they would otherwise be wider than the Mobile page. When this is done, photos are reduced in size without cropping them, so the image looks the same in all variants. But text columns, text panels, etc. are reduced in width only, so the text font size will not be reduced. In the example below the green photo, which is the full width of the Main variant page, was added to a Web Block in the Main variant. In the Mobile variant, the photo is automatically resized so it’s no wider than the Mobile page width.
Other Web Block Improvements & Fixes:
Info popup sometimes appearing incorrectly when adding new objects. Fixed.
Objects on top of Web Blocks are too easily added to the Block accidentally. Fixed.
Can’t select placeholder object if it’s the only object in a Web Block. Fixed.
Margin settings could be lost from Web Blocks. Fixed.
Problem with shadow added to object in flexible Web Block. Fixed.
Objects could change dimensions when moved between Web Blocks. Fixed.
Flex Layout toolbar appears when switching to any website document. Fixed - it now appears only when switching to a Modular website.
Publishing of stylistic changes to websites:
Many users reported that when they change some stylistic aspects of their website and re-publish, not all visitors to the updated site see the changes immediately without having to press Refresh in their browsers. This is now fixed so that all visitors to the updated site will always see the updated version immediately
Web Publishing Improvements:
Problem publishing filename with space in the name. Fixed.
Problem updating website with Designer Pro+, if it was published with an older Magix version. Fixed.
Support for Internet Explorer discontinued. This means websites no longer need to include additional legacy files that were required only for this old, unsupported browser
Italian Support:
Designer Pro+ now supports Italian, in addition to the German, Dutch, Spanish and French languages already supported. When starting the application for the first time on a device, it will use the current language as defined in Windows. Thereafter you can change the language at any time using Help > Language (requires an application restart)
Other Fixes & Improvements:
Document Color Profile - None:
Designer+ allows a Color Profile to be set on every document (Utilities > Options > View tab). This determines how CMYK colors appear on screen, because the color profile controls how each CMYK color is converted to RGB for screen display. With this update, the color profile is now optional, so you can select None as one of the profile options. When this is selected, CMYK colors will look the same on screen as when using older versions of Designer which did not have the color profile support.
Bitmap Export Dialog:
Zoom tool no longer working. Fixed.
Transparent option now always enabled and it automatically selects True Color + Alpha for the export when activated.
Other:
Stacking order changes not working properly with multi-selection. Fixed.
SmartShape unexpectedly removed from document after intersect operation. Fixed.
Help > Check for updates doesn’t always report when the program is up to date. Fixed.
File extension registration messages now clearer, when shown on program startup.
On-screen color separation preview incorrect when transparency is used. Fixed

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 23.2.0.67158 (Jul 6, 2023)

Working with Responsive Websites:
Using Web Blocks in Existing Websites:
Our new Web Blocks offer an extremely easy way of to build a new Modular Website (see Modular Websites above). But now you can also use the wide range of Web Block designs in your existing (non- modular) websites. You’ll find the Web Blocks in the Designs Gallery and Online Content Catalog, under Modular Websites > Web Blocks. Add a Web Block by double-clicking on it in the Designs Gallery, or simply drag & drop it onto your page. If you drop the Web Block onto an existing page it will be added to the bottom of the page, just above any footer, and it will automatically adjust to fit the width of your page. But you can now also create completely new pages in your existing sites, built from our large and constantly expanding library of Web Blocks.
Improved Positioning of New Live Shares:
Now when you Live Share an object with other variants, it is positioned more usefully in those other variants, relative to neighboring objects. Where you need a different layout in the other variant(s), you will still need to manually re-position the shared object, but in most cases this will be a time-saver.
Other Web Improvements:
When you delete an object that is shared with other variants, a prompt offers to delete from all variants.
Dragging live shared embedded objects between text areas doesn’t work across variants. Fixed.
Widget/placeholder HTML Head code is now shared across variants, as body code is.
Google Analytics code is now inserted immediately after <head> element, the current recommendation from Google.
NavBar menus with links to headings not updated correctly. Fixed.
Issue with cut & paste of Web Block. Fixed.
Links to SmartFields would only open in current tab. Fixed.
Undo of Web Block height change doesn’t work if smart transform is disabled. Fixed.
Personal SmartFields:
The set of Personal SmartFields in Designer Pro+ (Utilities > SmartFields …) has been extended to match the fields in your Xara Cloud profile, so that templates and documents using these fields will work the same way in both Designer Pro+ and Xara Cloud. The new fields in Designer Pro+ are full address, website text, facebook text, instagram text, linkedin text, twitter text, tiktok text and link, adding to the great time- saving potential of SmartFields.
Name Gallery Font Selection:
The Name Gallery is a useful but sometimes overlooked Gallery that allows you to see which fonts are used on the current page, and select text that uses each font, a quick and easy way to identify which text on a page uses a particular font or font variant. A change in this release will ensure it now works reliably for all multi-weight and multi-family fonts.
Other Fixes & Improvements:
+ handle disappeared on some SmartShape components. Fixed.
Serious error importing SVG file that has embedded WOFF2 fonts. Fixed.
The number of decimal places shown in the UI is no longer linked to Windows settings, which caused some user confusion. It now defaults to 2 decimal places and can be changed in the registry if required.
The Designer+ automatic updater now closes the program automatically to allow update installation to proceed

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 23.1 (Jul 6, 2023)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.5 (Dec 9, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.3.0 (Oct 24, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.2.0 (Oct 9, 2022)

Table Improvements:
Our great new table tool gets even better. So whether you need a table for presenting data, comparing products or even creating an invoice, it'll be quick and easy in Xara:
you can now re-order rows & columns with a simple click & drag
an automatic way to convert old Smart tables to the new tables
a host of other minor improvements & fixes, listed in full in the Release Notes, including an interim 22.1.1 release
Selection improvements:
Some changes to selection in response to user feedback and requests which should make object selection, the most basic and frequent of actions, more intuitive and consistent:
Selector tool transform handles are now slightly offset so they can't obscure any part of the selected object
A new rotate and skew mode
Double-clicking on a SmartShape now switches to the Quickshape Tool where all the handles are always available (just as double-clicking a photo switches to the Photo Tool)
If you don't want to maintain the aspect ratio when stretching, Alt+Stretch now consistently allows you to do so.
Align Toolbar:
The distribute options on the Align Toolbar (Window > Bars > Align) have been changed from Distribute centers, to Distribute equally spaced, a more common requirement because it works well with objects of different sizes.
New Repeating Objects option:
We've made the Repeating Objects feature a whole lot more powerful by introducing a new 'Make Repeating' option. This turns the current selected object into a Repeating Object, without automatically copying it to all pages - you can then copy it onto selected pages.
Other Improvements:
As always this Designer Pro+ update includes a large number of small enhancements and fixes including:
Inconsistent font sizes when pasting same sized text into ‘Shrink on overflow’ text boxes. Fixed.
Icon line widths wrong when replaced with SVG. Fixed.
Check and (when necessary) fix the Windows Explorer ‘thumbnail view’, automatically during program startup.
When replacing a color in an object, Xara will no longer preserve shading if there is only one shade of the color used. The user’s chosen color is applied directly instead.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.1.0 (Sep 5, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.9.0.64144 (Apr 6, 2022)

Switch to Microsoft Edge:
There are several tools that open a web browser window within Designer Pro to display content, namely the Widget Editor, Symbol Picker, Google Font Finder and Erase Tool Guide.
We previously used Microsoft Explorer for this, but with support for Explorer falling off (including among Widget providers), we have switched to the latest Microsoft Edge technology, ensuring a smooth workflow and support for the widest range of widgets.
Better Mobile:
We've made some changes that will improve the user experience for your all-important mobile visitors:
page animations have been improved on pages with vertical scrolling
a vertical swipe will no longer change page on pages with vertical scrolling
a swipe will no longer change pages if there is text selected (since the viewer is probably trying to change the selection not the page)
Extended Support for Numbered lists:
Now you can insert more sophisticated numbered lists, including a parent number.
Improved Page Number Display:
Now you can show total pages alongside current page, for example Page 3 of 44.
More intuitive Auto-Fit:
Auto-Fit is a great time-saving feature that automatically adjusts the font size of text to its container as you type (we also offer Shrink Text on Overflow, that only fits the text to its container when it runs out of space).
Based on user feedback we've changed the behaviour, so that if you try to change the font size of text with Auto-fit or Shrink Text on Overflow on, it is automatically switched off and the font size change applied.
Other Improvements:
As with every Pro+ update we've included a host of small but useful enhancements and fixes. In this release that includes:
Some characters missing from web export due to self-hosting of Google Fonts. Fixed
Serious error merging in List Styles on paste/import. Fixed.
CID font Noto Sans causes serious error. Fixed.
Can’t interact with form that has reveal animation applied. Fixed
Wrong miter on imported SVG. Fixed
WebP export fails after exporting a low bpp PNG. Fixed

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.8.0.63960 (Mar 9, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.7.0.63833 (Feb 17, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.6.0.63535 (Dec 6, 2021)

Wider SVG Support:
We can now export many more types of graphical object to web using SVG, to fully take advantage of the great support for SVG among modern web browsers.
That means there are fewer bitmap images to download, so your websites load faster - with all the usability and SEO benefits that brings. What’s more, your content will also look sharper as SVG.
Flat, linear graduated and circular graduated fills all now export as SVG. Which means it’s now possible to build graphically rich web documents and websites that have no images to download at all!
Multi-Line SmartFields:
SmartFields are another great time-saving feature of Xara Designer Pro+, offering an efficient way to deal with commonly used text phrases that you want to insert in multiple places in text.
In this release we've increased your opportunities to benefit from SmartFields by adding support for multi-line SmartFields.
Other Improvements:
As usual with Pro+ updates we've included a host of small but useful enhancements and fixes. In this release that includes:
Improved AI import, including support for more recent AI versions.
Wrong font sometimes applied to text in PDF export. Fixed.
PDF form field import/export fixes.
Spelling dictionaries updated.
Web publishing (sFTP). Compatibility problems with some external hosting services solved.
SVG file with linear gradient failed to import. Fixed.
Overlapping text in exported SVG. Fixed.
Error sometimes shown moving mouse pointer over text inside shape. Fixed.
Clipped Opacity Mask Group incorrectly rendered after move. Fixed.
Dead accent key handling fixed, when working on text inside smart components.
Canonical links in conventional websites now reference the correct page filename.
rel=”noopener” can now be stripped from a web link with a blank target by applying the name “opener”.
WebP web export option could sometimes be auto enabled when saving a template after applying a page background. Fixed.
New Live Copy Options:
Live Copies allow you to create multiple copies of any image that can be updated simultaneously with a single edit (similar to Repeating Objects, but more flexible since you can have multiple Live Copies on a single page and they don’t have to be in the same position). It’s a valuable time-saving feature for illustration and document creation.
We’ve made numerous improvements, which will make working with Live Copies easier and more flexible, you can find full information in the Release Notes.
Flexible new options for Live Copies include splitting into Live Copy sets
Online Help:
The Help file has been moved online, which will allow us to update it between software upgrades, and integrate it with the online knowledgebase articles, to create a more comprehensive and up to date help resource.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.5.0.62826 (Aug 3, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.4.0.62528 (Jun 24, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.3.0.62275 (May 27, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.2.0.62177 (May 18, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.0.0.61527 (Mar 10, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 20.8.0.61047 (Feb 2, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 12.8.0.50771 (Jul 12, 2017)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 12.2.0.45774 (Aug 22, 2016)

Website Design:
Stick At Top:
By popular demand, you will now have the option for an object to scroll to the top and then stick.
New Scrolling Animations:
We also have a completely new type of animation. You'll find 30 'scrolling animations' in the Reveal tab of the web animation dialog, which link an animation to the position of the scroll bar.
Instead of the animation running once when the object first appears (like reveal animations), the object animates whenever the document is scrolled, and the speed of the animation is proportional to the scrolling speed.
'Website M' Included Free For 365 Days:
Designer Pro includes an upgrade to ‘Website M’ hosting (worth $1.99 a month), free for one year as part of our new Update Service. 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.
Enhanced 'On Reveal' Animations:
On reveal animations were one of the hits of v11. These are animations that are triggered as your object comes into view, and we’ve added 40 new animation types that work on reveal, such as bounce, zoom and flip.
Parallax Scrolling Effects:
The must-have effect for any contemporary site, parallax is a kind of 3D effect created by the background moving at a slower rate to the foreground.
Other Web Improvements:
A new and improved media player (by default it uses the HTML5 capabilities of the web browser to play the audio and video where the browser supports it, otherwise Flash).
The preview window has been updated to include MS Edge preview (Windows 10).
Xara Online Designer:
Significant improvements since last year include:
Dramatically improved editing features (add & delete objects, move & resize, add & delete pages).
Bitmap export & download.
PDF export and download.
Create New Document (yes, your document no longer needs to be created in Web Designer!).
Photo & Graphic Design:
Easy Move, Rotate & Scale for Photos:
Select a photo in the Photo tool and you’ll see some new handles on the photo, for scale, rotate and crop. It’s a lot easier and more intuitive than using the Fill tool for these simple but frequent actions, and it’s smarter too – ensuring you never see any gaps around the edge of the photo when you move it in its frame or change the shape of the frame. Top Tip – it’s great for horizon straightening!
Scale & rotate with the curved arrow and push the photo with the hand. You can change the shape of the frame with the edge handles.
New Blend Modes (dodge and burn):
We’ve added two great new transparency blend modes, compatible with the W3C standards: Dodge (which generally brightens) and burn (which generally darkens).
Magnetic Lasso:
Cutting an object out of your photo is now as simple as clicking along the edge of the object to be cut, and hitting Cut!
Click the Magnetic Lasso icon in the Freehand region tool to discover a much quicker way to cut out objects.
Photo Effect Painter:
Check out the new paintbrush tool on the photo fly out. Now you can simply ‘paint’ on photo effects such as the new dodge and burn. And what’s more you can still edit the values of the effect, or edit the painted region with the Region Painter or Eraser.
A region painted using the Desaturate-medium effect. The ‘marching ants’ dotted outline shows the region is selected and active still.
New Cross Process Photo Effect:
Create some dramatic contrast and saturation effects with this new option on the photo enhance toolbar, which simulates a traditional photographic effect created by using the wrong chemicals (digital photo editors such as PGD achieve the same effect by manipulating the red, green and blue channels).
Create dramatic photo effects with the new cross process option.
Photo Filter Pre-Sets:
A wonderfully quick and easy way to apply popular effects to your photos.
You’ll find more than 25 ready-made effects in the Content Catalog (image resources > photo filter pre-sets). Simply select your photo and hit Import! What’s more you can continue to edit the effects using the Enhance tool or Brightness Levels dialog, and if you replace the photo the effects are retained.
Just a few of the pre-set photo filter effects in the Content Catalog.
EXIF Tool Improvements:
The EXIF tool has been enhanced, so it now supports IPCT and SMP tags.
Panorama Tool Improvements:
Fans of the integrated photo panorama tool will be happy to see some big improvements, see the Release Notes for full details of what's new in PanoramaStudio 3.0.
Text Handling:
Symbols & Icons:
Check out Insert > Symbol. These are not just useful symbols and icons that you can add to your text, but fully editable vector shapes!
The popular Font Awesome collection has been updated, and is now supplemented by a collection of Google Material Design Icons making more than 1500 symbols in total.
We’ve added a search function for the symbols, eg search on ‘Face’ and it will show you Facebook symbols, smiley faces etc.
The symbols will be automatically updated as new versions become available.
Plus there’s improved handling of symbols that have been added to your text (so for example they aren’t affected by font changes to the text).
A new right click Replace Symbol option (including symbols in bullet lists).
You can now choose from over 1500 icons and symbols.
Other Text Enhancements:
A new 'keep with next paragraph' option, typically used to prevent headings appearing on the last line of the page or text column.
And a 'keep lines together' option, which can be used to prevent paragraphs from being split across pages or columns.
Better handling of text on buttons (so font and font size changes are synchronized on the mouse off and mouse over state).
Improved subscript / superscript positioning.
A new rectangular text repelling option.
Option to change the case of selected text, switching between UPPER CASE, lower case or Sentence case.
The spell checker menu now allows you to set the language for your whole document
Improvements to the auto-kerning (now supports kerning between character classes, so many newer OpenType fonts now render with the correct kerning).
An extra toolbar for the advanced text options, positioned under the InfoBar by default.
You can now select just the bullets/numbers in bulleted/numbered lists, so you can then adjust the color, size or font independently of the list text.
Two separate numbered lists can now be linked (so for example you could have a graphic in the middle).
And other minor enhancements.
Content:
All Business Themes Now Included.
Each theme is a complete website, with linked pages typically required for that business type, and with professional photography suited to the business. This makes it easier and quicker than ever to create a complete, professional looking website for almost any type of small business!
View previews of the Business Themes.
A New Online Content Catalog:
An enhanced Online Content Catalog will be included free for one year as part of our new Update Service. Based on the v11 Content Catalog, this new and improved version will now offer:
Fully integrated access to a free library of over 500,000 quality royalty-free stock photos and over 59,000 vector illustrations
Regular updates to the templates as part of the Update Service
Full keyword search of the entire catalog
A new more logical structure to the content offering a better work flow
The Designs Gallery (now 'Local Designs Gallery') will now be used to display only your current assets (those downloaded from the Online Content Catalog or from the optional back-up CD) making it quicker to access the resources you are already using.
Finding the right content is now easy with the Search feature in the new Online Content Catalog.
Photo Grids:
These are a cool new way to display your photos. We’ve added both fully editable Smart Photo Grids (Smartshapes) and simple photo grid templates.
The Smart Photo Grids let you display any collection of photos, even those with different shapes and aspect ratios, in a compact grid on your website. Drag and drop your photo onto the grid and it automatically updates to fit your photo in, no matter what shape it is!
Photo Grids offer a cool new way to display your photos.
Other New Templates:
new General Website Themes all including mobile variants.
A selection of new modern NavBar and standalone button designs.
Social media templates such as Facebook, G+ and Twitter covers.
A wider range of photo hovers and photo sliders, and extra photo clipart.
A handy new page counter widget.
A selection of new designs for buttons, cards, invitations, certificates & vouchers.
Handy placeholder images for common aspect ratios (4:3, 16:9 etc).
View previews of a selection of the themes and other templates (select the NEW filter to see some of the new ones).
New templates include covers, profiles and more for all the most popular social sites.
New SmartShapes:
SmartShapes are an amazingly quick and easy way to create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes. There are improvements to the way SmartShapes work (eg improved handles) plus some great new additions to the library of these ultra-editable ready-made shapes:
New Chart SmartShapes for percentage ring, bar chart and column chart.
New Text Panels and Photo Panels.
A new and more flexible version of the popular Spiral SmartShape.
Other new SmartShapes include some simple shapes such as a rectangle where you can edit corners individually and custom lines.
New variants of existing SmartShapes such as arrows and speech bubbles.
We will soon be offering a public API for SmartShapes for anyone interested in developing their own (programmed in Javascript).
New SmartShapes include bar charts, column charts, pie charts and percentage rings.
Other:
Update Service: Access New Features As They Are Developed
We know that many of you find it frustrating that you have to wait a whole year for our next update - knowing that we are working on (and likely finished) new cutting edge features and on-trend content. We have the answer! For the first time you’ll have access to new features and content as we develop them, at any time during the 365 days after you purchase. You’ll be able to download and use these new features, for no extra charge, in addition to the version that you buy today.
The Update Service gives you 365 days access to:
Xara Online Designer, including any updates during that time.
The new Online Content Catalog, including any new templates released during that time.
M Website Hosting.
Upgrades and patches to Designer Pro released in the 365 days after you purchase and register. Note: these updates continue to work after 365 days in any installations at the date of expiry, but if you reinstall the software after the Update Service expires (and you don't renew) then these updates will not be included (the software will revert to the version at your date of purchase or registration).
More info on the Update Service.
Other Enhancements:
You can now give individual objects names in the Page & Layer Gallery, to help find objects and to organize your designs.
Distribute operations have been added to the Align toolbar.
Import & Export:
Improved Word import and export.
Improved PDF import.
Improved RTF import and export.
Improved PSD import & export (we now map Xara objects to & from Photoshop layers).
Minor improvements to SVG import.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 11.2.0.40121 (Jul 28, 2015)

ART BRUSHES:
We are introducing a new type of brush stroke called an “Art” brush, which stretches the brush shape, which can be either vector or bitmap, along the line. The original type of brushes, in versions up to V10, are now called “Scatter” brushes because they repeat or scatter the brush shape at intervals along a line. But these have been improved as well. You can now use any kind of object in a brush definition. It's now possible to use feathering, text, extrusions, etc. in scatter brush definitions, which makes them much more powerful.
LIQUIFY SHAPE EDITING TOOLS:
There’s a new dropdown list on the right end of the Shape Painter Tool , which contains a selection of vector shape editing tools. Select a tool from the list and choose a nib size on the left of the InfoBar. Then select the shape you wish to edit and hold the left mouse button down to apply the nib to the edge of the shape to modify it.
Plug-in Tools:
The Liquify tools and SmartShapes use a new plug-in technology to provide ways to extend and enhance the drawing features of the program. It's our intention to publish a programming API that will allow third parties to extend Designer to add their own features, tools and SmartShapes. These are all written in the Javascript language. The API is not ready to be released yet, but if you are a Javascript developer and are interested in using this in future, please send us a support ticket to register your interest and we will contact you when it’s available.
NEW BLEND MODES / TRANSPARENCY TYPES:
In the Transparency Tool, the existing ‘stained glass’ and ‘bleach’ transparency types have been renamed to match the industry standard names ‘multiply’ and ‘screen’ repectively. We’ve also removed most of the other, less used and non-standard types from the supported list and replaced them with 5 new W3C standard blend modes, which are described below. Note that where existing documents use the types that have been removed, those types will still appear in the transparency type dropdown.
Overlay - a combination of Screen and Multiply and generally used to boost the contrast in an image. The areas of the top object where the underlying objects are light becomes lighter and the areas of the top object where the underlying objects are dark becomes darker:
Grey (darker than 50% grey) will darken and add contrast to the underlying image.
Grey (lighter than 50% grey) will lighten and add contrast to the underlying image.
Other colors - lightens and adds contrast to unsaturated colors and darkens and adds contrast to saturated colors
Hard Light:
Hard Light combines Multiply and Screen transparency modes. Equivalent to Overlay, but with the bottom and top objects swapped. • White - no effect on the colors in underlying objects, the whites remain completely white. • Black - no effect on the colors in underlying objects, the blacks remain completely black.
Soft Light:
This is a softer version of Hard Light. Again works similarly to Overlay although in a softer and less harsh way than Hard Light.
Luminosity:
Luminosity affects the "lightness" of the image. It blends the lightness values of the top objects with the lightness values of the underlying objects, whilst ignoring the color values.
Color:
Color is a combination of hue and saturation. Almost the opposite of Luminosity, the colors of the top objects are blended with the colors of the underlying objects whilst ignoring the luminance values
HYPHENATION:
Hyphenating long words at the ends of lines in a flowing paragraph of text allows more text to fit on fewer lines. This is especially important with fully justified text to reduce the “rivers of white” problem, where a lot of white space has to be introduced to pad out each line to the exact width of the text column. In earlier versions of Designer, words were only hyphenated if they contained an actual hyphen character or had a soft hyphen added manually. Version 11 now includes automatic hyphenation as a new paragraph attribute. It uses a combination of built-in hyphenation rules, language-specific hyphenation dictionaries and even an optional list of custom hyphenations for each document.
ABBREVIATION EXPANSION:
In the spell-checker drop-down on the Text Tool InfoBar there is now a new “Auto-correction options …” entry. This allows you to set up your own shortcuts for terms or abbreviations that you tend to type regularly. So if you want to be able to type “Rwd” and have that instantly replaced with “Responsive Web Design”, simply press the Add button and enter “rwd” in the replace field and “responsive web design” in the with field. All text in the dialog is forced to lower case, but the replacement tries to be smart about use of case, so:- RWD is replaced with RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN rwd is replaced with responsive web design Rwd is replaced with Responsive Web Design.
Commonly used replacements are already set up by default, so for example you can type (C) to get a copyright symbol ©. You can also replace text you type with a symbol from the Font Awesome symbol collection included in Designer, to make it easy to enter commonly used symbols into text. Enter the text you want to replace, click in the “With” field and press the “Pick Symbol…” button to bring up the symbol picker dialog. The symbol you choose will appear in the “With” field.
EMBEDDED GRAPHIC OPTIONS:
You now have much more control over how text is formatted around objects that you paste “embedded” into text. As in previous versions, to embed an object copy or cut it to the clipboard, go into the Text Tool and place the text caret at the point in the text where you want to insert it, and then paste. Now if the object you insert is wider than the text area or text column, the object is automatically resized down to the width of the text column. Right-click on the embedded object and choose the new “Embedding Options “ entry near the top of the context menu.
Scaling:
In the first section of the new dialog you can specify how the embedded graphic should behave if the width of the text column/area is changed, or if the graphic flows into a text area with a different width.
Positioning:
In this section of the dialog you choose how the graphic should be formatted into the text. The default option is “Inline with text”, which means the graphic behaves just as if it’s a large text character in the text. So use this option when you want to include a graphic in a line of text as if it was a character, like this or if you want it on a line of its own. This is how all embedded objects were formatted in earlier versions of Designer. Alternatively you can now choose to have the text flowing to the right of your embedded graphic, like this, by choosing the “Text wraps right” positioning option. Or if you want the graphic on the right and the the text flowing to the left, like this, choose the “Text wraps left” positioning option instead.
Margins:
The bottom section of the dialog allows you to add some space around your graphic, so it doesn’t appear too close to the text or to the edge of the column. The embedded photos above have a margin of 50px applied on just one side, to make sure there is a gap between the text and the photos. You can specify different values for each of the 4 sides of your graphic, or use the lock buttons if you want to have the same margin top and bottom, or left and right, without entering the same values repeatedly.
Break - Move below embedded graphic:
When you have text flowing to the left or right of an embedded graphic, sometimes you may want to force the next paragraph of text to start below the graphic. So to enable this, there is now a new type of break character that you can insert: Insert->Break->Move below embedded graphic. This is used in the text above, alongside the embedded photo examples.
FONT REPLACEMENT AND STYLES:
It’s often useful to be able to completely replace one font with another across your entire document or website, especially if you don’t have a particular font installed and want to replace it with a font you do have. In the Text Tool just right click in the text with the font you want to replace and choose the new “Replace font with …” option from the context menu.
Choose the font you want to use instead and click Apply. All variants of the font are replaced across your document, each with the matching variant and size of your chosen font. There’s also a new entry in the text styles menu , “Update other style to match”, which will help you to apply text styles to unstyled documents, or update an existing style to look like some unstyled text you’ve imported. For example perhaps you’ve pasted in some text that you like the look of from another document and you want to make all your ‘Normal text’ look like that text. Just select the text and choose this new style option.
PDF IMPORT IMPROVEMENTS:
Improved text editability (improved text reconstruction, margins, better text link import, better underline import).
Better support for import and editing of PDFs with embedded font subsets, where fonts are not installed locally.
Many other fixes and improvements
MAGIX PANORAMA STUDIO 2.6:
A new high-performance blending procedure renders big panoramas significantly faster.
The new Image manager allows replacing and selective editing of input images, even after the image stitching.
A new option allows converging lines in planar/perspective projections to be avoided.
A new option to add GPS location information to panoramas (Geotagging).
90 new cameras were added to the camera database which now contains more than 2100 digital compact and SLR cameras.
The updated RAW import now supports more than 500 cameras.
A new option to add metadata to panoramic images, which allows Google services to automatically detect panorama images.
The HTML5 version of the "PanoramaStudio Viewer" for interactive panoramas now uses WebGL, if available, and there is no longer a limit on the size of panoramas viewed.
DOCUMENT SYNC USING DROPBOX OR GOOGLE DRIVE:
Designer 11 supports a number of innovate features related to ‘cloud drive’ services from Dropbox and Google Drive. These services provide free file storage in the cloud, and a small desktop utility that can be installed on your PC that will automatically sync files saved on your hard disc to the cloud - and if the file is shared with other users, or you have Dropbox on any other computer, then it’s synced to that other computer. Once in one of these cloud drives, you can also edit the text in your documents in Online Designer, using any web browser or mobile device. Changes you make with Online Designer will be saved back to the cloud drive and then in turn synchronised to your other computers
Multi-location editing:
Designer 11 now notices if files have changed, and will automatically reload updated files. This is particularly useful if the file is saved in a Dropbox or Google Drive folder on your computer. It means that you can have the same file open on multiple computers, or in Online Designer, and if you make an edit, save the file, then it will be updated in Designer on the other computers. Further, using the cloud drive file sharing, you can share the file with someone else, and whenever they edit the file and save, your version will be updated, and vice versa. This does not solve the problem of edit clashes. So if you edit the file and at the same time someone else edits the same file, then Designer will tell you there has been an edit and give you the choice of opening the updated file in a new document.
Revert to earlier versions:
One particularly cool feature that comes as a consequence of this is that Dropbox and Google Drive maintain older versions of your files, and provide ways of viewing and reverting back to earlier versions (in Dropbox you just right click on a file and select 'View previous versions'.)
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS:
Automatic hyperlinking:
Designer 11 now recognises most web links when you enter them into text and automatically sets up the hyperlink for you using the same address. So I can just type www.xara.com and it becomes a link in the text without me needing to do anything else.
Text background color:
You can now set the background color on text, which is useful for highlighting. Go into the Text Tool, select the text you want to change, right-click on a color on the color line and choose the text background color option from the menu.
Photo Text Panel:
New text panel SmartShape with a photo (Insert->Shape->Photo Text Panel).
Intersect all shapes:
New combine shapes operation for splitting shapes at all intersections. Arrange-> Combine Shapes-> Intersect All Shapes
PDF Export:
Now exports embedded font outlines properly in the case where the font is not installed (for PDF editing). Support for latest CMYK PNG images
So if you have have a document open in Designer, and then revert that file to an older version from Dropbox, that causes the file on your computer to be replaced by an older version, and Designer will automatically re-open the older version. This is a safe, easy, and storage-saving way of maintaining multiple versions of files
Other small improvements:
Improved support for drawing with modern touch devices, including MS Surface stylus.
New spiral SmartShape (Insert->Shapes).
Option to export retina version of graphic at the same time as 96dpi version (see bitmap export dialog).
Insert page number. New dialog allows insertion as new repeating object.
Insert->Rule-off
Insert->Break. This allows you to insert page breaks and column breaks using the main Insert menu, instead of just the context menu.
Option to show extended Text Tool InfoBar, instead of some controls being in a flyout bar: Window-> Bars-> Extended Text InfoBar.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 10.1.1.34966 (Jul 23, 2014)

Photo Tools:
New Shadow and Highlight Controls:
Two great new options within the Photo Tool that give you precise control over specific areas of your photo that are in deep shadow or bright light. Simply use the sliders on the InfoBar to lighten/ darken those areas, without affecting the brightness levels of the rest of the photo.
Select & Enhance Colors:
A new Color Select option within the Enhance Photo Tool provides a fast and intuitive way to perform any enhance operation - such as a change of brightness, contrast or color - based on a selected color in your image.
PhotoLooks Plug-in:
PhotoLooks 2 is a powerful and flexible plug-in (previously sold by Red Giant for $199) that will be bundled with all copies of Designer Pro X10 - and it could change the way you approach color in photography!
PhotoLooks includes over 100 presets inspired by real commercial projects, from wedding vignettes to popular cinematic looks. But you can dive deeper by exploring the PhotoLooks tools and their powerful way of manipulating color and light to create your own custom effects.
So if you want to capture and intensify the mood of your photo, or add a popular film look from soft lighting to Hollywood drama - then PhotoLooks is the tool you need!
Panorama Tool Improvements:
There have been several workflow improvements to the integrated photo panorama too, for example it's no longer necessary to arrange images left to right prior to stitching. There is also improved image alignment and lens distortion correction.
Auto-Rotate of Photos on Import:
You might have recently noticed that that your photos were being randomly rotated when you imported them from some modern devices. Where necessary Designer Pro X10 now does an auto detect and rotate to fix this issue.
32 bit plug-in support:
The 64 bit version of Designer Pro now supports 32 bit Photoshop and other Live Effect plug-ins.
Web Authoring & Publishing:
Responsive Web Design:
With the surge in popularity of browsing on mobiles and tablets it is becoming essential to create sites that are tailored to the needs of these visitors. Until now the solution has involved creating multiple sites and a good understanding of JavaScript. Designer Pro X10 introduces a RWD solution that allows you to create a single file containing variants of your site at different widths, so that you website responds dynamically to the screen size of the viewer, presenting the design most appropriate to their device. And as you’d expect from Designer Pro you won’t need to do any coding whatsoever!
Put simply you can create multiple variants - eg desktop, tablet, phone - with shared content (eg text, photos, graphics) but with the ability to freely customize the layout of the variants to suit the target device size. The layout of the variants is entirely in your control, ensuring a quality result for mobiles and tablets. Designer Pro exports a single HTML file that can dynamically change from one layout to another depending on the screen size of the viewer.
Creating Online Presentations:
The new page transitions are a great enhancement for presentations, but there are also a few other minor useability enhancements in the process of creating and viewing steps, plus two new aspect ratio ‘empty’ templates (16x10 widescreen and 4:3 traditional screen).
Scale To Fit:
Instead of designing presentation websites for specific screen sizes, the pages will now intelligently and automatically scale to fit any browser size (or you can set them to full-screen). Nb you can use this for websites too, it could be a good option if, like presentations, they are relatively small sites with short pages (might be good with a Supersite for example, so each page would automatically resize to fit the browser window).
Single Page Supersites:
If you have a small or very focused site and you’re struggling to make it stand out from the crowd, you’re going to love our new concept of souped-up single page sites!
Instead of your website being presented as separate web pages in the traditional way - where you have to click a link to navigate from one page to another - you now have the option to present the whole website as one single, fast scrolling (horizontal or vertical) document using scroll or swipe to navigate. Or you can present pages one at a time in the traditional way, but with our new super-slick animated page transitions (see below), triggered by scroll or swipe gestures or clicks.
The possibilities are endless but examples include event promos, portfolios, teasers for new products, fundraisers, short tutorials or CVs. It’s great for simple single product sites (a font, a template, a car for sale...) and it might be a more eye catching and interactive option than a PDF document (see our menu example). Whatever your application it’s ideally suited to the many users who now browse on tablets (whilst being completely backwards compatible with normal browsers).
New Page Transitions:
V10 offers significantly improved page transition effects including 3D effects, which are hardware accelerated, super-smooth and completely flicker free. They’re ideal for presentations, but can also be used with great effect for Supersites.
Password Protected MAGIX Online World Pages:
If you publish your website via MAGIX Online World (free MOW hosting is included in all copies of Designer Pro), you can now easily password protect that website. Includes full facilities for managing your authorization list.
Design & Useability Enhancements:
Font Awesome Symbols:
A quick & easy way to insert symbols from the large and growing Font Awesome selection. The full set is displayed via the Insert menu, simply browse and click on the symbol you require to insert it in your document as a text character or graphic.
SmartShapes:
An amazingly quick and easy way to create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes – for example speech bubbles, fancy arrows and text panels - with top quality results guaranteed. If you don’t have the time (or skill) to master the drawing tools you’ll no longer need to resort to clipart. Here are some examples from the Smart Shapes library (internet delivered, so more shapes will be added thru the rest of this year) that can be easily customized.
Insert Menu:
A new top level Insert menu which considerably improves the ease with which you can insert key elements into your document (eg insert new page or insert page number) including some new options eg ‘insert image from Camera’, SmartShapes and Font Awesome symbols.
Content:
Content Catalog:
An online extension of the Designs Gallery offering greatly improved browsing of content, within a resizeable window - especially valuable for web themes.
New Widgets:
3 new photo slider widgets
New social media widgets: Instagram badge, Instagram SnapWidgets (embed your Instagram photos into a website as a photo gallery), Pinterest and LinkedIn badges
New Templates:
11 brand new contemporary General Website Themes (normally sold in Web Packs for $10 each, so that's $110 worth!) with up to 16 page layouts, all including new mobile variants.
Import / Export:
Microsoft Word Import .doc added, .docx improved:
.docx import has been significantly improved and support for .doc files has been added for the first time.
Improved RTF Import & Export:
There is improved support for text styles, lists, anchored and embedded bitmaps, strikethrough text and pagination.
Improved PDF Import:
The PDF import filter has been replaced with a completely new one which is already showing significantly improved editability.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 9.2.1.28737 (Jul 11, 2013)

New Masking Tools:
It’s a pretty common requirement to want to work on just one part of your photo (or indeed vector image) - for example brightening a selected area of a photo, or cropping a specific shape out of a photo or vector image.
With the new mask and region tools it couldn’t be simpler. With the region painter tool you can draw a selection region to apply effects to (such as you brightness change, or crop) or you can use the mask painter tool to protect an area from being altered.
New Photo FX Plug-ins:
11 all-new photo plug-ins for a dazzling array of creative photo effects:
Fake HDR: simulates the effect of HDR images
Tilt Shift: Certain image areas are blurred resulting in a miniature world look
Orton: Blurs the image in a special way which makes the colors stand out
Little Planet: Turns the image into a mini planet
Pencil: Transforms the photo into a pencil drawing
Lomo: Gives the image a processed appearance by distorting its colors
Color Splash: Specific areas of the image are in color and the rest is black and white
Polarised greyscale: Converts the image into greyscale after treatment of certain color filters
Color Mix: Mixes up the red/green/blue color channels
Sepia: Transforms color photos to give the impression that it's on old paper
Thermal: Certain parts of the photo are colorized, without affecting the brightness, similar to a thermal imaging camera
Improved web page background handling
Backgrounds behind your web page that fill the whole of the browser window (regardless of how wide the window is or how big your monitor) are all the fashion, whether they are graduated fills or textures or simply headings that stretch across the whole window. So we’ve added some significant improvements to background handling in v9:
A selection of quality background designs in the Designs Gallery (see below in Content)
A new right click menu allows you to easily set pasteboard and page background
You can draw anything on the website backdrop
Supports the new drag ‘n’ drop re-coloring methods for easy re-coloring
Efficient tiling texture backgrounds
Fixed backgrounds (stay fixed as the page scrolls over the top)
Improved web font embedding:
Xara’s innovative font embedding technology gives you the freedom to use a much wider range of fonts on your website than the traditional limited ‘web safe’ fonts, by embedding fonts in the uploaded site (where license permits). In v9 we’ve enhanced the export so that the embedded font files are much smaller. And smaller font files mean faster websites!
A new 'pull' option extends the automatic page resizing and object positioning feature
Automatic object positioning and smart page resizing was one of the big hits of v8, because it’s such a great time saver. Now we’ve extended the feature so that it works in reverse, automatically adjusting the position of objects and shortening the page when you delete text or objects on the page.
Improvements to the creation & editing of web presentations
Changes to the presentation feature make it more intuitive and quicker:
We no longer auto-delete empty steps during editing (delete on export/preview/save instead)
The current step is shown in the presentation bar
Adding a new step makes that new step current
Steps above the current step are hidden
Drag & drop NavBar replacement
A new and really easy way of replacing NavBars in your document with a new NavBar design. Simply drag and drop the new design from the Designs Gallery onto the current NavBar in your document. All features of the existing NavBar such as menus and links are automatically copied.
A new category of business specific theme designs
You will see a new category of business web themes in the Designs Gallery, designed for specific business types, such as pubs, travel agents, hairdressers, etc. Each is a complete website, with linked pages typically required for that business type, and professional photography suited to the business. This makes it easier and quicker than ever to create a complete, professional looking website for almost any type of small business.
More than 100 business specific web themes will be offered for sale (note they are not included in Pro as standard) at the time of v9 launch and we plan to offer more by the end of the year. Coming soon... matching print templates!
A collection of new Widgets
Designer Pro X9 includes new Widgets that add support for basic tables, easy addition of Google+ buttons, and support for Google’s AdSense advertising program. Plus there are 6 exciting new photo slideshow and gallery widgets. You’ll find them in the Designs Gallery.
23 new general print theme template designs
There is a new folder in the Designs Gallery called Print Themes (General), consisting of 20+ themed letterhead, compliment slip and business card designs. These match the Web Themes (General) of the same name, so you can have a consistent style across your whole business.
Other Enhancements:
Fly-out toolbars easier to use
Version 9 release makes it easier to traverse the fly-out menu without it closing.
Useful right-click menu options on document tabs
We've added some useful right-click menu options on document tabs: save as, close all but this, discard, close all, discard all.
Larger thumbnails
In v9 .web files are saved with extra large thumbnails so you can take advantage of the ‘extra large icon’ view option in Windows File Explorer (Windows 7 & 8)
Windows 8 touch compatibility
v9 is now compatible with Windows 8 touch devices.
Tileicons & Favicons
v9 improves Favicon support for Internet Explorer producing anti-aliased alpha-channel favicon images. In addition if you apply the name ‘tileicon’ to the same graphic it will export a much larger (144px square) version of the favicon that both Windows 8 Internet Explorer 10 and iOS devices will use when you add or ‘pin’ the website to the home screen.
64 bit Windows version
Designer Pro now takes advantage of the power of 64 bit, if your computer supports it, enabling you to create larger, more content rich documents - for example this is excellent news for anyone creating large websites with lots of high-resolution photos (typically 50 or more) where the memory limits of 32-bit Windows were becoming a problem.
User note:
With 64-bit Windows you’re no longer limited to the 2 to 3 GB RAM available to the old 32-bit systems. Most current computers (Spring 2013) are now provided with 64-bit Windows and typically have (or can have) more than 4 GBytes of RAM installed.
Improved speed and quality for JPEG / PNG
A new and improved JPEG / PNG converter means significantly improved import / export times, and a subtle quality improvement.
New ‘Link to top’ option
A new ‘top of page’ option is available in the Link dialog that allows you to add a text link or button that scrolls to the top of the web page.
More efficient tile bitmap export
Rectangles that contain a tiling bitmap fill or a simple axis aligned graduated fill are now exported more efficiently as a single tile, set to repeating (rather than having the whole object rendered as a single large bitmap).
Simple page color change
There is a new quick and easy right click option to change the color of the page or pageboard background.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 8.1.0.22207 (May 16, 2012)

Clone Tool (Clone and Magic Erase):
The Clone Tool has been significantly improved. When you clone, copy or magic erase an area it now uses the current edited photo as the source, instead of the original photo (for manual clone and magic erase objects), which makes the whole process far more WYSIWYG.
Color Erase / Selection tool:
This powerful new tool serves two purposes; to erase (make transparent) parts of photos based on colors, and secondly to allow only those color-selected areas to be adjusted using the Photo Tool Enhance operations (such as Brightness, Blur, Hue Adjustment etc).
Hue Adjustment:
The Photo Enhance tool now includes a new hue adjustment feature, allowing a photo (or parts of a photo when using a soft mask or the new ‘color select’ feature, see below) to be tinted with any color.
Other Photo Improvements:
An updated ‘Optimize all images’ function will scan all graphics and images in your document - now including PNGs as well as JPEGs - and convert them to the optimum size and optimum image type.
This can substantially reduce memory use and .web file sizes. (NB this is a destructive operation).
You are also given the option to optimize images to JPEG when importing, if Designer recommends it.
The integrated Panorama stitching tool now stitches up to 8 photos (previous limit was 6) and processing is multi-threaded for higher performance on multi-core computers.
Photo replacement is now smarter. When you drag and drop a photo onto an existing one, other existing copies of that image are not all replaced together by the new photo, unless they are inside the same soft group.
Shape Builder Tool:
This tool enables you to ‘paint’ onto an existing shape to enlarge it, add new areas or adjust the shape or outline. It does this in a vector way, and is a much more direct and often easier way than using the Shape Editor tool. You can adjust the size of the ‘brush’ as well as its aspect ratio and rotation angle.
Shape Eraser Tool:
This is really two powerful tools in one, and can be used to perform hard-edged vector erasing of shapes and photos, or soft erasing.
Text Styles:
Designer now supports Text Styles, a powerful way to alter the appearance of text throughout your document with just a few clicks. Update an element of your Text Style eg font, color, line spacing etc, and all text with that Style applied throughout your document is instantly updated – headings, titles or body text. Consistent text styles help you create professional looking documents, and now it couldn’t be easier.
Import & Export:
'Import graphics from the Web' has been improved and now imports graphics and text from a web page, and places them in the right position on the page. Note that since most websites use scripts, mouse-over effects and hidden objects and text, this will rarely produce a WYSIWYG result, but it is very useful for importing all graphics and text from an existing website.
Improved Copy / Paste of HTML items from other applications such as web browsers (Note the same restrictions apply as above).
SVG Import. It's now possible to import most SVG files (we say ‘most’ because there is no industry agreement for SVG format - for example different web browsers support different sets of features).
Beta import of OpenOffice Impress (.odp) and PowerPoint (.pptx).
Improved PDF import.
Update of camera RAW import.
Automatic object positioning & smart page resizing:
Designer Pro now has the ability to make growing text areas automatically push other objects down the page, and also lengthen the page automatically to accommodate the enlarged text areas. Creating websites based on templates will now be considerably easier and faster.
Optimize all images:
An updated 'Optimize all images' function will scan all graphics and images in your document - now including PNGs as well as JPEGs - and convert them to the optimum size and optimum image type. This can substantially reduce memory use and .web file sizes. (NB this is a destructive operation).
You are also given the option to optimize images to JPEG when importing, if Web Designer recommends it.
Character based languages:
Improved formatting support for character based languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Right click options:
Right clicking over any empty area of the button bars on the Web Designer window will show a context menu to quickly enable or disable any tool bar.
Lock page size option:
A new 'Lock page size' option has been added in the 'Page Options' dialog. This can prevent accidental drag resize of the lower or right page edge.

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 7.1.1.17261 (Nov 1, 2011)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 6.1.0.13048 (Jun 16, 2010)

General:
Totally re-designed application appearance (skin and icons)
Fly-out tools and buttons present a simpler UI, but with direct one-click access to a wider range of common functions.
Improved Page & Layer Gallery with new 'Solo' mode. The updated Page & Layer Gallery (replaces the Object Gallery) offers better page and layer management, including a new 'Solo' mode which allows a specific layer to be viewed and worked on in isolation, and a new 'Layers' mode which adjusts the Gallery to show just the layers for the current page. You can also move directly to any page in a long document by clicking on the page in the Gallery. Plus the Page & Layer Gallery includes a new 'Find' mode which automatically adjusts the Gallery to find and show the currently selected item in the tree structure, collapsing everything else.
Auto-updating designs gallery: The Designs gallery includes new 'online' sections and content, that can be updated remotely.
Automatic backup of all open documents. Automatic backup and restore of open documents on application closedown. So you can now just close Designer Pro with open documents, and next time you start Designer Pro all the open documents are restored.
New Paste Style Fly-Out. There is a new copy / paste fly-out bar available from the clipboard icon on the top bar, which provides direct access to the common clipboard operations.
Hierarchical arrangement of the Designs Gallery. A hierarchical arrangement of the Designs Gallery makes it far easier to find the template you're looking for at a glance.
Drawing Features:
Easier Control of Graphic Styles (attribute rules). There is a major change in the way that attributes (the appearance or 'style' of an object) are applied to a newly drawn object or line. Now a new object can take on the style of the last selected object, rather than the last drawn. It sounds like a small change, but is more intuitive and more powerful - for example you can copy the style of any object by just selecting it then drawing a new object.
Opacity Masks. A new and powerful way of applying transparency. Sometimes you need a more advanced transparency 'shape' than simple flat or graduated transparency can provide, for example if you wanted to apply a soft variable transparency around a central object in a photo. Opacity masks are a way of defining irregular transparency shapes based on a drawn object or group of objects.
New Enhance Transparency Type. Enhance Transparency allows you to adjust the brightness, contrast, color saturation and color temperature of any part of your document, including text and drawings – just like the Enhance option in the Photo Tool. Simply create your floating 'enhance transparency shape', and use the Photo tool controls to set its brightness, contrast etc. Objects with Enhance Transparency are just perfectly normal objects which can be placed over any drawing, not just photos. They act like other transparency types, showing the objects underneath the shape, but the items under it are 'enhanced'.
A new straight line / arrowhead tool. This provides a really simple way to draw single-segment straight lines and a new way to control the arrow head and tail on any line.
Solid, live shape drawing. When creating new shapes such as rectangles, ellipses and quickshapes you'll now see a solid filled shape as you drag across the page (instead of an outline). It's far more WYSIWYG, you'll see the correct fill and line color as you drag. Similarly drawing lines with the Freehand tool is now solid WYSIWYG live line drawing. This works even if you have a fat line, with a line profile and feathered.
Solid blend update. When you edit one end of a blend, (Ctrl+click to select the shape inside the blend) this is now also real-time solid update.
A new Sketch Mode button on the Infobar of the Freehand tool removes the automatic line joining feature, so that you can rapidly draw lines without worrying about them being automatically attached, great for sketching.
Balanced bezier editing. Using the Shape Editor tool, simply hold Shift down and both ends of the bezier control points will be equidistant from the center point. This enables more rounded or balanced bezier curves to be drawn going through a point.
Outline Trace Assist ("magnetic lasso") In the Freehand tool, there is a new option on the Infobar which can assist in drawing of vector lines around the outline of high-contrast shapes or objects in photos. Simply select this option, and then draw around the edge of the shape, and the program will analyze the underlying image and draw the line along the edge.
Enhanced Pressure Sensitive Line Drawing.
Support for pressure sensitive tablets has been re-written so it's much more accurate and responsive. This also works as solid real-time variable-width rendering as you draw with a pressure pen on a tablet.
Selector Tool Info (Perimeter / Line Length / Area calculations). The InfoBar in the Selector tool has two new fields displaying the perimeter length of any selected closed shape or the line length, and the area of any closed shape. Particularly useful for plans where you have set up accurate unit scaling.
Photo:
Content Aware Scaling Tool. This has been enhanced with some innovative new 'intelligent scaling' features: Content-aware photo zoom is an alternative to content aware scaling (CAS) whereby the photo remains the same size and the content is intelligently zoomed inside it. Alternative 'Content Aware Scale'. Now, holding the Alt key when dragging one of the side handles in the content-aware scale tool performs a different intelligent scale using an alternative algorithm that will work better with some photos.
Clone tool. This is an entirely new tool (on the Photo tool fly-out) to make it easier to 'erase' region of photos by copying (cloning) parts of a photo from one place to another, even from one photo to another. In the Clone tool you simply draw a freehand line around the area you want to erase (the clone shape is shown as a 'marching ants' dotted outline) then just drag anywhere on the photo outside the clone area to pick the new source for this area. You can resize the clone and feather the edge to achieve near perfect results.
Selective Photo Enhance. You can now perform selective enhancements (brightness, contrast, saturation, levels...) to any part or region of a photo using the Mask feature (now at the bottom of the main toolbar). You can adjust the blend of the effect by using the Transparency tool, for example by creating a graduated transparency you can create a faded enhance effect.
EXIF Viewer. In the Photo tool fly-out is an EXIF dialog, semi transparent and configurable, which shows the embedded EXIF values of a JPEG photo. EXIF data is now preserved on export of JPEG photos and across an Optimize Photo operation.
Automatic import resolution reduction. Most modern digital cameras produce very high resolution images, that are typically unnecessarily large. These take a lot of memory and can produce very large files. When you import a photo using drag 'n' drop from your File Explorer or using the Import menu, the program now offers you the option to reduce the resolution.
A new 'Optimize all JPEGs' function. This will reduce the size and resolution of all photos within a document to save memory and produce smaller .web or .xar files.
Perspective Correction Tool. This is a new tool available on the Photo tool fly-out, a simple one-click way to automatically correct common perspective effects.
Simplified photo editing workflow. Now you can just open a JPEG, edit it, and click Save to get an edited JPEG saved back in its place. It's a faster and simpler workflow than before, doing away with the need for separate saves of the .xar file and export of the JPEG. And yet the the original master JPEG is still retained and can be recovered or restored at any time, there is still a lossless editing cycle, and you can still open an edited JPEG file and remove or undo the edits you've performed on the image.
Resize photo to be 1:1 (100%) Sometimes it's useful however to have a 1:1 mapping between image pixels and screen pixels, so you know at 100% zoom that you are seeing the full resolution, non-scaled image. So now in the Photo tool on the Infobar there is a new icon which will resize the image back to be 1:1 at 100% zoom (in other words 96dpi - the same resolution as the screen).
Brightness Curves. In the Levels dialog you can now create a manual brightness curve which provides very detailed and advanced control over brightness levels for any photos.
Auto filling of the photo-gallery via simple drag 'n' drop. If you drag and drop a selection of image files onto a page of thumbnails, such as any photo gallery template, it will automatically populate the gallery.
Text Tool:
Text Tool Find and Replace. A real-time search and replace function has been added to the Text tool which can search the current story, page or whole document.
The Text tool now includes bullets, numbered lists, indents.
Web Authoring / Web Publishing:
Free web hosting offer: Designer Pro now comes with a free website hosting offer from MAGIX, so you can publish your website as part of Magix-Online world. The offer includes 500MB of storage and your own web address.
Templates Gallery expanded. Many of the existing designs have been updated plus there's a large collection of completely new designs, both themes and individual web graphics including new NavBar and 'graphics' folders. Every theme now includes a ready-made fully linked up 8-page website, so you can quickly and easily create whole sites.
Drag 'n' drop Widgets from the Designs gallery, and new Widget library. New sections in the Designs Gallery provide a wide range of 'widgets' which can be drag-dropped onto your website. The Widgets provide interactive website add-ons ranging from movie players, to e-commerce features (e.g. a 'Buy' button to sell goods or services from your website) Forms, Maps and a lot more.
Much improved NavBar handling (it pretty much replicates the functionality of Xara MenuMaker now).
A new NavBar top level object which can be dragged around as a single object.
Take a any button design and quickly turn it into a horizontal or vertical NavBar.
Ability to create an automatic NavBar with buttons linked to all pages of your website. The NavBar is updated as you add / remove pages.
Auto-highlighting of 'current page' Navbars buttons.
DHTML sub-menus with various animation and transparency effects
Paste HTML snippets in directly with automatic preview/placeholder created. Many website add-ons and widgets provide a snippet of HTML to embed into your page. Web Designer can now accept just pasting this snippet, and it detects this is an HTML snippet and automatically creates a placeholder on the page, with a static preview of the snippet. Copy the HTML code to the clipboard and simply paste it into Designer Pro. After a few seconds a placeholder object appears with a preview image. You can positioning this anywhere on your web page.
Improved, more slick, photo thumbnail pop-ups. The animated photo pop-up effects (where clicking on a photo thumbnail pops-up a larger version) has been improved to provide higher quality animation effects, an optional soft shadow, title and captions and page dimming (the page under the pop-up can be dimmed).
Ability to do a slideshow and Next / Previous on a gallery or any number of thumbnails. If you have a number of thumbnail photos with the pop-up effect on the page, you can now show this as a slideshow, with Next / Previous / Play / Pause controls with an optional thumbnail strip shown at the bottom of the window.
Easy MP4 video upload and built-in video player. Drag 'n' drop an MP4 video file onto the page, and it embeds a Flash video player to play the file, and automatically uploads the video file to your web-server.
A new quick 'Preview current page' as well as Preview whole document options: The Preview icon on the top bar is a new style fly-out with 2 options; Preview current page, and preview whole website.
Better page and background support i.e. you can color the pasteboard separate from the page. If you drag a color onto the pasteboard area (outside the visible page area) this allows you to create a separate backgrounds for both the page and page surround. For both the page and pasteboard area if you hold Ctrl and drop a bitmap onto either page or pasteboard you can create a tiling bitmap background.
Ability to support rounded corner pages, and with drop shadows. If you enable page coloring this way (by dragging a color onto the pasteboard), then in the Page & Layer gallery a new Page Background layer is enabled, where you can adjust the page rectangle's soft shadow using the shadow tool, and also make it a rounded rectangle (using the rectangle Tool).
Drag 'n' drop color schemes, and pre-build color schemes in the Design gallery for all Themes. Instead of editing each individual named Theme Color, you can now alter the whole color scheme of your website on one go.
Remember FTP details with document including password. The Publish Properties dialog now offers the ability to save the FTP details with the document including named FTP profiles
Easy way to add links to (and upload) external files such as PDF and Word files etc.
Incremental Publishing. When you publish your website, only those files that have changed are uploaded. This can represent a huge speed and productivity improvement for medium to large websites. It also means that embedded large attachments (e.g. PDF files, videos, etc) are uploaded only once.
Other minor enhancements:
The Screen Capture tool (Utilities -> Screen capture..) now provides the option to capture after a set time-out period. So, for example, you can capture menus or other pop-up items that would otherwise disappear if you had a key-press capture trigger
Photo tool enhance attributes can now be blended using the Blend tool
Panorama tool: General stitching and blending improvements
Ctrl-Click (select inside group) on a text line will now select the text object and not the individual character you click on
Pixel units can be entered as px or pix
Automatic crash reporting dump a stack trace to disk and, with the user's permission, transmit to Xara
PDF export: Reduced memory requirements when exporting
Clipview behavior changes. Keyhole controls have gone which reduces on-screen clutter, and now there is right click menu to select the clip shape or the contents of the clipview
When adding a new section of a line the smoothing control will now smooth the whole line rather than just the last section
All sliders can now be adjusted using the mouse-wheel by just holding the pointer over the slider. No need to give the slider focus first
There's a new option in the Help menu to reset the Alert dialogs so they can be made to appear again.
An updated Xara Xone tutorials CD and Quick Reference Card
Photo Optimize dialog simplified

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 5.1.0.8917 (Jun 5, 2009)

New Object Gallery
This replaces the Layer Gallery from earlier versions and is a new more powerful and flexible tool for viewing, re-ordering, hiding and locking not just layers, but everything from individual objects on the page to pages in your document.
Everything in your document is presented in a hierarchical, expandable list, a bit like the Windows file Explorer. At the top level are the pages, and inside each page are the named layers of the document, and inside each layer are the objects on the page, which may be grouped objects. You can now hide or lock not just layers, but individual objects on the page. The gallery provides thumbnail views of all objects.
The Object Level of the Object Gallery is only available in Xara Xtreme Pro.
The Object Gallery makes it much easier to find, select, lock or hide objects inside complex drawings, or objects inside groups or hidden under other objects on the page.
Content-aware photo resizing
The Photo Tool has been enhanced with a new intelligent image scaling technology that allows images to be stretched or squashed while retaining the proportions of important parts of the picture. This can provide a near miraculous ability to stretch and change the aspect ratio of photos, without apparently distorting the content of the photo.
Masking
A new masking system allows parts of a drawing or photo to be marked for operations such as deletion, clipping, copying etc. It can also be used in conjunction with the Content-aware photo scaling to further protect parts of a photo during a stretch or squash operation.
It provides a new and easy way to clip photo and drawings to the inside of any shape.
Improved Text Tool
Automatic Font Embedding.
All documents now embed the character outlines of all used fonts so that you can transfer a Xtreme Pro document to any other Xtreme Pro users and be sure they will see exactly what you see, irrespective of what fonts you use. This embeds only a subset of the fonts – only the characters used in order to keep the file size overhead to a minimum. Xtreme Pro files remain by far the most compact of any vector graphics software package.
Anchored Graphics
You can attach graphic objects to a specific place in a text story, so that they move with the text. This provides a way of embedding graphics within a flowing text story, or to hang images in the margin, and for those graphics to stay with that text as it's edited and moved around the document.
Spelling checker
A multi-language spell checker is included offering check-as-you type, word suggestions and user-dictionary. You can mark different text regions as being in different languages.
Improved website export
A very large number of improvements from the recently introduced Xara Web Designer are included, enabling Xara Xtreme to be used as a first class web authoring tool. While Xara Web Designer has a limited set of drawing tools, and as aimed purely at website creation, Xtreme Pro is a much more powerful document creation, and graphics tool, able to produce everything from highly complex illustrations to multi-page Desk Top Publishing and PDF documents. It's easy to create printed brochures, PDF files, and top quality websites all from the same document.
Some of the significant improved website features include:
Single click website preview
Improved ability to add third party web page 'widgets' such as YouTube videos, Google Maps, and tens of thousands of other web page add-ons
Improved text positioning and accuracy for WYSIWYG web page creation
Improved support for text flow around photos, and irregular text margins. What is hugely difficult with traditional HTML editing tools is now easy
Improved mouse-over and pop-up effects
Improved mouse-over button and Navbar creation and editing
A wide range of new, high-quality, website templates
Improved font menu including web-safe font section
FTP upload included so you can publish direct to your hosting company servers.
Other improvements
More than a hundred other improvements and new features across most areas of the program are provided, including;
Copy / paste now retains layers
Repeating objects, ideal for headers and footers or repeating logos across all (or some) of the pages in multi-page documents
The Transparency Tool now supports multi-stage graduated transparencies (works rather like multi-stage graduated color fills)
Easier object naming and name handling via a new Name dialog.
Screen capture utility
Soft Groups. A new type of object grouping allowing groups to contain members across different layers.
Improved 'rapid sketching' support for the Freehand Tool
Photo temperature control (warmer or cooler), easier photo clipping
Improved PDF export (supports PDF 1.7) and PDF import
Improved EPS and Adobe Illustrator import and export
Stretching of rounded rectangles now retains the corner radius. No more stretched corners
Direct page resize by dragging the page edges.
Improved Flash export (automatic optimisation of photos, you can tween saturation, blur, easier page size clipping, jump on mouseover events and more)
Better multi-page support (page can be different sizes, have different layers, easier page copying, re-ordering and deletion via the Object gallery)
Updated RAW photo support for more recent digital cameras

Xara Designer Pro+ Changelog

What's new in Xara Designer Pro+ 23.6.0.68432

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 23.2.0.67158 (Jul 6, 2023)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 23.1 (Jul 6, 2023)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.5 (Dec 9, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.3.0 (Oct 24, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.2.0 (Oct 9, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 22.1.0 (Sep 5, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.9.0.64144 (Apr 6, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.8.0.63960 (Mar 9, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.7.0.63833 (Feb 17, 2022)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.6.0.63535 (Dec 6, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.5.0.62826 (Aug 3, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.4.0.62528 (Jun 24, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.3.0.62275 (May 27, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.2.0.62177 (May 18, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 21.0.0.61527 (Mar 10, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 20.8.0.61047 (Feb 2, 2021)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 12.8.0.50771 (Jul 12, 2017)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 12.2.0.45774 (Aug 22, 2016)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 11.2.0.40121 (Jul 28, 2015)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 10.1.1.34966 (Jul 23, 2014)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 9.2.1.28737 (Jul 11, 2013)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 8.1.0.22207 (May 16, 2012)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 7.1.1.17261 (Nov 1, 2011)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 6.1.0.13048 (Jun 16, 2010)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 5.1.0.8917 (Jun 5, 2009)

New in Xara Designer Pro+ 4.0.4966 (May 7, 2008)