CNET Editors' review
Xara Xtreme Pro offers various design possibilities in one compact program. While novices should be wary of its complexity, Web designers, animators and illustrators will find something to like.
The program's interface is a complex spread of tiny, unfamiliar icons. Fortunately, there are several tutorial texts and even a few videos to better familiarize users with its many features. The overwhelming impression we got from its tools was that Xara Xtreme is not for beginners. While it takes great pains to teach users about its various elements, there's no hand-holding. It takes a lot of effort and thought to produce professional-looking designs. That said, Xara Xtreme offers just about every tool imaginable for creating a Web page from scratch and posting it online. The animation options are a little less inviting since its commands aren't as extensive, but it still offers several tools and framing options. The drawing option feels like Microsoft Paint; anyone could use it. The program comes with a bevy of special features, though our favorite was its Web design templates, which make the complicated process of creating attractive Web sites a little smoother for inexperienced designers. Overall, Xara Xtreme is a great choice for those who need a comprehensive design package. Those who need things spelled out for them should find a program more suited to beginners.
Xara Xtreme has a 30-day trial. It installs desktop icons without permission. This program is a liberating tool for design pros, and we recommend it.
Publisher's Description
From Xara:
Xara Designer Pro is the perfect choice for professional design work, ideal for both print and the web. It's equally flexible with vector or bitmap graphics, making it perfect for any design that combines drawing, photos and text - from simple button or logo designs to incredibly detailed illustrations, posters, multi-page brochures, presentations and photo compositions. And it's great for the web as well - from Flash animations to complete HTML web pages and websites. Time saving drawing features such as automated soft shadows, bevels, contours and feathering make this a supremely easy to use and productive tool - plus Xara Designer Pro offers the fastest rendering in the business making it ideal for experimentation. The UI is designed to minimize the on-screen clutter with on-document editing that makes your design the center of attention. Supports common industry formats including PDF/X and PSD, and offers full color separation and PANTONE support for commercial print output. Download the 7 day free trial that can be extended to 30 days.
What's new in this version: Version 7.0 features:
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All versions:
4.3 starsout of 3 votes
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Current version:
4.0 starsout of 1 votes
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My rating:
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"Nice product, disconnected support and community"
Version: Xara Designer Pro 7.1
Pros
It does good quality vector graphics and operations, it has a good UI, and has a really nice WYSIWYG web page generator. I've been using this for years.
PDF generator is also good.Cons
-Website generator uses javascript over CSS and DIV for positioning and some other things. Instead of just for layer popups.
-Bad font handling for web generator
-Uses undocumented(except for obscure references on a 3rd party forum) layer properties that you have to manually type in layer name fields.
-The 3rd party forum, the only feedback medium, has negative responses to pretty much all feature requests and support questions through their board.. The actual company never seems to go there.
-They don't seem interested in keeping up with technologies and trends. Like web 2.0 placeholder templates etc..
They instead say it's not supported, and if you don't like it use something else(not far off from this attitude).Summary
It's probably the best WYSIWYG and vector tool out there, great supplemented with gimp or photoshop and a code editor; I use notepad++.
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