Xara Xtreme 5 and Xtreme Pro 5 - What's New

There are over 100 enhancements in the new V5! Below you will find a detailed list of all these new features, fixes and improvements, roughly categorized as General, Text, Photo, Drawing etc.

 

All of these features are fully documented in the V5 help. We also have an additional published document that covers some of the main new features. 

General

- A new Object Gallery, which replaces the Layer Gallery as a general method of selecting pages, layers, and objects. Pro has a more advanced version. 

- A new masking system allowing easy selection of regions of photos. Used by the Intelligent Photo Scaling

- Copy / Paste retains layers

- Repeating objects across pages and new menu options to make an object repeat across all pages. Smart positioning of items like repeating footers so they are positioned at the correct place irrespective of page size. Useful for website navigation and also as headers, footers or Master page-like features on DTP style documents

- Multi-stage transparency. Works like multi-stage graduated color fill

- Improved color matching on inserting clipart objects (by import and paste)

- New Name Dialog.  Much easier to add, remove names to/from objects, instead of having to use the more complex Name Gallery. This is used for adding Anchor points, amongst other things

- Recently used documents are now presented in a sub-menu File > Open recent, defaulting to 20 entries remembered

- File > New menu expanded to allow up to 20 template documents 

- Screen capture utility

- Install fonts from the Fonts Gallery without having to restart as Administrator on Vista and Windows 7.

- Improved Link color control (global site-wide and ability to override on a per link basis)

- Web Safe font section of the font menu

- Drag n drop a photo will now give the option of replacing all instances of that photo
- Photo color temperature (warm / cool) control added
- Direct crop (just drag on Photo in Photo tool, no need to go into crop mode)
- Easy crop adjust - the crop handles are shown always in Photo tool so you can just drag sides of any photo, at any time. No need to go into Crop mode
- Next & Previous added for use in Photo mode
- Zoom to 1:1 on selected photo
- Constrained rotate (with Ctrl) will now always include an upright, so it's easy to rotate photos to be axis aligned
- Dragging anywhere on a photo in the Fill Tool now re-positions (it used to create a new fill). Shift drag will create a new fill
- Large imported photos are resized to 500 pixels by default (user configurable in Options dialog)

- New Red-eye tool to replace existing PhotoClinic / XPE one

- Enhanced Liquid Color UI

- New "mask mode" to make it easier to cut photos and shapes and to allow masking of parts of a photo when using content aware resizing

- More predictable view positioning when adding/deleting objects in photo documents

- Panorama stitcher improved so it copes with a larger vertical shift between images to be stitched.

Object selection
- New cross-layer grouping system called Soft Groups. Ctrl+Alt+G to create SoftGroup, Ctrl+Alt+U to un-SoftGroup. When you select any member of a SoftGroup, all other parts are selected and transformed the same way, even if on hidden layers.
- If 2 or more members of a SoftGroup have identical text, they will be synchronised when the text of any of them is edited
- Double click to select NavBars, or any Repeating objects with the same repeating name
- Double click in Selector tool on objects selects an appropriate tool e.g. Shape Editor, Rectangle, Ellipse, Photo Tool, Text Tool
- Stretching rounded corner rectangles in the Select Tool maintains the aspect ratio of the corners (but only if singly selected)
- Ctrl+Click (select inside) on a text object inside a Group now selects the whole text line and not the single character
- Ctrl constrained rotate will now align rotated rectangles to be axis aligned (i.e. it's easy to make rectangles, and photos, be exactly upright)

- New Object Gallery. This replaces the Layer Gallery. It presents an expandable tree view showing pages, layers, groups and (in Pro only) objects with thumbnails. Pages and layers can be re-ordered and renamed using the Gallery and in Xtreme Pro objects can be selected, moved or copied using drag and drop. The order of items in the Gallery under each page node reflects the z-order of objects as they appear in the design.
- Pro only: Any object can now be locked (not selectable) or hidden (made invisible) using the new Object Gallery. In V4 this was only possible for layers.

Flash related

- You can add a link to the whole animation now (useful for banners)

- Hi-res photos are automatically resampled down to maximum size used in the animation (at 100%), no need to manually optimize any more

- In Flash animations, you can make a click re-direct to another part of the animation

- Pages can now be different sizes (new document option to choose same or different page sizes)

- Pages can have different layers

- Importing page templates from Clipart/Designs Gallery adds them as a new page

- Object Gallery supports drag n drop page re-ordering, pages to be named directly in the Gallery, easy page deletion and copying.

Website related

- Each page can have its own name (used in HTML export), and links to pages can be made to named pages via drop-down lists of pages

- Improved style or Theme-based color matching when importing and pasting

- Single click export of PNGs and JPEG (export dialog stage is now optional)

- Improved vertical positioning of text, for more accurate WYSIWYG text placement

- New Web Properties dialog

- New website related set of buttons and a new 'website' bar for single click access to Preview, Export website, Web Properties, Links dialog, FTP Publish

- FTP Publish capability (one-click publishing to your web host)

- Mouseover now works for any overlapping object (more than 50% overlapping) on the MouseOver layer and is no longer cropped. (It means that irregular shaped rollover buttons are easier)

- Double click on NavBars selects all the buttons in a bar (and on all layers) for bars that have been marked as repeating objects

- Force objects to be PNG or JPG using new Image dialog

- Ability to change JPEG compression on a per image basis

- Improved HTML source code formatting and readability

- Improved smart elimination of replicated graphics. (Reduces the file size and download size if you have exactly the same image repeated on your website e.g. NavBars, logos etc, can make a huge efficiency saving for larger websites)

- Easier Alt and Title tags and ability to add 'tooltip' pop-up messages to images

- Ability to link to Next & Previous pages, so it's easy to create navigation systems with Next & Previous links without having to manually set up each link

- Ability to link to MailTo; links without the email address appearing in the HTML (uses simple email address encoding) to avoid SPAMbot trawling. Just add an email address into the Link field and this is done automatically

- Drag and drop photo galleries from the Design Gallery. Easy replacement with your photos with automatic pop-up from thumbnails.

Website Pop-ups

- You can make pop-up layers appear on-click as well as on mouseover

- New photo thumbnail with automatic pop-up feature (no layers required), with deferred loading (great for hi-res images), with animated effects.

(all these and other web effects are demonstrated in example site published here: http://webdesigner.xara.com/

 

Printing, Import & Export

- Much improved Adobe EPS import. Now imports most if not all iStock vector files and Vector Magic traces

- Improved PDF import

- Updated PDF export: Links to pages and anchors, default document link color and per-link colors, mouseover popup titles, embedded Flash (as added to documents via Web Properties Placeholder tab), Support for PDF 1.7.
- Updated RAW import for more recent cameras.

Templates

- All Web Designer web themes included

- Set of preset simple shapes (as in MS Office and Open Office apps)

- All Calendar templates rebuilt to be multi-page templates

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