Version 19 Release Notes

Scroll through this document to see a description of all the great new features & content released in Xara Designer Pro v19. If you have an active subscription to Xara Designer Pro+ (available standalone or included in Xara Cloud Pro+, our great value bundle of Xara Cloud and Designer Pro+) purchased from Xara, then these updates and any later ones are free. If you are an owner of an older version purchased from Magix, then check out our current offers on upgrades to Pro+. You can find Release Notes for the previous version, Designer Pro X18, here. You can find Release Notes for the new Designer Pro v20 here

Contents Version 19 Release Notes 1 Version 19.0 3 Web Improvements.................................................... 3 Self-hosting of Google Fonts............... 3 Use Photo Filename.................................. 3 Canonical Links............................................ 4 Other Web improvements.................... 5 Show Profiled Colors.................................................. 5 Text Improvements..................................................... 5 New Google Fonts...................................... 5 Other Text Improvements..................... 6 Import/Export................................................................. 6 Final Notes........................................................................ 6 Version 19.0.2 7 Web Windows to Edge.............................................. 7 The Widget editor....................................... 7 Google Font Finder.................................... 7 Symbol picker................................................ 7 Erase Tool Guide window...................... 7 Account Menu................................................................ 7

Version 19.0

Web Improvements

Self-hosting of Google Fonts

Google Fonts are immensely popular with web designers, providing a huge library of quality fonts with good cross browser support, which is why we provide seamless support in Xara Designer Pro. However a recent court decision in Germany has cast doubt on whether calling fonts from Google is compatible with GDPR (because it passes the IP address to Google). Xara has reacted quickly with this new release of Designer Pro+, which offers instant compliance by automatically publishing any Google Fonts to your web space, and no longer referencing Google. All you need to do is republish your website. Xara’s automatic self-hosting makes an otherwise complex workflow simple, but there could be performance and SEO benefits too. In the past, it was considered better to link to Google Fonts and not self-host fonts because of browser limitations. But with modern browsers, that is changing. Now self- hosting fonts can improve page speed and Web Vitals score, with all the SEO and page rank benefits that implies.

Use Photo Filename

Many customers have asked why the photos in their published website don’t use the original filenames of the photos that they imported, so that Search Engines can find and index those names. That’s because it’s not always helpful to expose those names in your public website - some filenames may be inappropriate and others may having nothing at all to do with subject of the site and so could be worse for SEO rather than better. Also of course most photos from digital cameras have meaningless names anyway. Therefore users can control what names are used for image files in the published website or web document. The Utilities > Web Properties > Image tab lets you set any name for the selected photo and that name will then be used for the photo’s filename. And since sometimes the photo’s original filename is useful there is now an additional Use photo filename button that will instantly fill that name field for you with the selected photo’s original filename (if it has one). Only use this if the photo filename is meaningful and relevant to the content of your site.

Filename set on selected photo, for use in web export

Canonical Links

A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines which specific URL to treat as the master copy of a page, thereby preventing SEO problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. Publishing a web page to your domain might mean the same page is served when visiting the web page address with or without the www prefix and on both HTTP and HTTPS protocols. This can appear as duplicate content to search engines. Applying a canonical link will suggest which URL to show in search results and allow search engines to count links pointing at different versions as links to the canonical version. A <link rel=canonical> is now automatically applied to the <head> of your web page when you publish to Xara Hosting / MAGIX Online World. If you are publishing to Other Web Host, enter the URL you want set as canonical in the Website URL field. links with target="_blank" A link that is set to open in a New window or tab (_blank) will now automatically have the ‘noopener’ and ‘noreferrer’ attributes applied. This is a security improvement to prevent the targeted page from gaining access to the referring page.

Other Web improvements

• Alt text added to web document viewer buttons • Minor improvement to positioning of videos on popup layer

Show Profiled Colors

The Show Printer Colors option in Window > Show Printer Colors has been replaced with Show Profiled Colors. As the name suggests, in this mode all HSV and RGB colors in your document are processed using the current document’s selected color profile, in the same way as when your document is exported to PDF/X for printing purposes using the same profile. So in this mode the on-screen appearance of these colors should now more closely match how the colors will appear in the PDF. And the colors seen on screen will vary, depending on the color profile used (as set in Utilities > Options > View). As you can see in the following example, the HSV/RGB green voucher design looks very different on screen in Designer Pro, compared to how it appears when exported to a PDF/X for printing. By turning on Show Profiled Colors, the colors on screen in Designer Pro look much closer to those of the PDF/X. Note that this mode does not change the on-screen appearance of any CMYK colors in your document, as these are always displayed by applying the same document color profile.

Text Improvements

New Google Fonts

We’ve added 21 new Google fonts offering new and interesting typography options.

Other Text Improvements

• When pages in a flowing document are re-ordered, page breaks are now added to prevent text moving between pages, which can be confusing. • Spell checker: Each SmartField is now treated as a separate word. • Fixed an issue with some font type icons missing in the menu, on HiDPI displays. • And other minor enhancements.

Import/Export

As with every Designer Pro release we continue to improve on our industry-leading file format support: • Improvements to PowerPoint, Word and PDF import • Enhancements in PDF to Word export • Fixed reported issues with import of AI files in the stock illustration folder of the Online Content Catalog.

Final Notes

As with every release we’ve also implemented a large number of minor enhancements including improvements and fixes the Open Graph dialog, the button palette and Shapes.

Version 19.0.2

Note 19.0.2 is the version of 19 sold by Xara, these features are not in v19 if purchased from Magix

Web Windows to Edge

There are several functions in Designer Pro that bring up a web browser window inside the application, to display content, including:

The Widget editor

Used when inserting/editing most of the widgets available in the Online Content Catalog.

Google Font Finder

Launched when you click Add in the Google Fonts section of Fonts menu.

Symbol picker

Launched when you click Insert > Symbol

Erase Tool Guide window

A guide to using the Erase tool Until now these have relied on using a variant of Internet Explorer. But since Internet Explorer is coming to the end of its life and support for it on the web is declining, it’s time to upgrade these windows. The Widget Editor in particular was becoming a problem, as external widget provider websites have been dropping support for Internet Explorer. So with this update, all the above web windows are now using the latest Microsoft Edge technology instead.

Account Menu

The new Account menu has options to help you manage your copy of Designer Pro.