Xara Photo & Graphic Designer v20 Release Notes Scroll through this document to see a description of all the new features released in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer v20 (2023), a one-time purchase option from Xara. Note: If you have an active subscription to Xara Photo & Graphic Designer+ purchased from Xara, then all of the updates mentioned below are already included in your version, as well as later monthly updates released under the Plus subscription plan, and the entire premium Online Content Catalog (now called Xara Elements). If you wish to benefit from these regular updates, Xara Elements and premium support, then the Plus subscription is for you. You can upgrade any older version of Photo & Graphic Designer from Magix or Xara to either Photo & Graphic Designer v20 or Photo & Graphic Designer +, check out our current upgrade offers. You can find Release Notes for the earlier v19 here.
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Tables.................................................................................... 3 Creating Tables.............................................................. 3 External data in Tables............................................. 9 Export to Word & PowerPoint........................... 10 Convert old tables to new................................... 10 Useful Table Shortcuts........................................... 10 User Interface & User Experience................................................................. 10 New Look User Interface...................................... 10 Web Windows to Edge........................................... 11 The Designs Gallery................................................. 12 Online Help................................................................... 12 Line Gallery................................................................... 13 Other UI and UX Improvements...................... 13 Text & Document Management 13 Font Menu Improvements.................................. 13 Multi-line SmartField Values.............................. 13 Personal SmartFields.............................................. 14 Numbered Lists.......................................................... 14 Change font size and Auto-fit........................... 15 Handling missing characters............................. 16 Apply changes across all pages....................... 17 Name Gallery Font Selection............................. 17 Other Text Improvements .................................. 17 Photo & Graphic Design....................... 18 Selection and the Selector Tool....................... 18 Other Selection Improvements........................ 21 Shape Editing Improvements............................ 21 Live Copy Improvements..................................... 22 Make Repeating.......................................................... 23 Align Toolbar................................................................ 24 CMYK Color Profile Control................................. 24 Other fixes and improvements........................ 25
Import & Export................................................ 26 Your Purchase Options & Xara Account.......................................................................... 27 Multi-language support........................................ 27 A New Subscription Option................................ 27 Managing Your Xara Account............................ 27
Contents

Tables

Tables are often a key part of any business document, which is why we’ve been working on a new, very flexible and powerful Table Tool, to replace the old Smart Table SmartShapes. You will find the new tool at the bottom of the main Toolbar on the left .

Creating Tables

The Table Tool InfoBar is where you can change the settings for a selected table or selected cells in a table. In the Table Tool, click the first button on the InfoBar to quickly create a new table . Or you can click- drag on the page, to drag out a new table with the number of rows and columns you want. There are also seven ready-made table designs in the Designs Gallery that you can drag and drop onto the page.
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Cell padding
Cell horizontal justification
Cell vertical justification
Cell background color
Merge and split cells
Cell borders
Create table
Insert rows
Delete rows
Delete column
Row height
Insert Columns
Column width
Cell spacing & table background color
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Create all the tables you need with the new Table Tool Table Size In the Selector Tool, single-click to select the table, then simply drag the table width/height handles to change the width/height of the whole table. Or you can set the width and height in the InfoBar, as you would with any other object. Changing Rows & Columns When you have a table selected in the Table Tool, move the mouse pointer over the hotspots as shown below.
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Using these controls you can quickly add rows and columns, change row and column sizes, select and delete rows and columns, all directly on the table without using the InfoBar. Use Ctrl+click or Shift+click on the row and column headers to select multiple rows/columns. Backspace will also delete a selected row or column (whereas Delete will delete the contents). You can set the selected row heights and column widths on the InfoBar numerically, which makes it easy to give multiple rows or columns the exact same sizes. Selecting Cells Selecting cells you want to change is easy. First click to select the whole table, then in the Table Tool you can click on individual cells to select them. Or click-drag to select a rectangular range of cells. You can also Ctrl+click on a cell to add it to the current selection, or Shift+click to extend the current cell selection range. You can also select multiple cells while in the Text Tool, by simply click-dragging. Cell Contents Once you have selected the cell(s) a simple Delete will delete the contents. The usual copy and paste commands will work, Ctrl C and Ctrl V. Font, font size and color can be changed like regular text. Paste unformatted Sometimes when working with tables you’ll want to copy the contents of one table to another table. If you
Click on the dots to add rows/columns Click-drag on borders to change row/col sizes Click here to select rows/columns Row selected - click to delete row
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simply copy the cells of one table, and paste them onto another, this will also paste the style of the source table cells, as well as the content. When that is not required, there is a Paste unformatted option, in the right-click context menu. So to paste just the cell contents, copy (Ctrl+C) the source cells in the first table, select the target cells in the second table, then right-click and choose Paste > Paste unformatted from the context menu. Cell Background Color By default cell background color is white. To change this, select the cell or cells you want to change, and click the new color you want in the Cell color background dropdown on the right side of the InfoBar, which includes all the theme colors in the current document. If you select the Edit option in that dropdown, you can open the color editor to create a custom color. Alternatively you can right click any color on the color line and select Set Table Cell Background. Note there is also a table background color behind the cells, which you will see if you open up spacing between the cells; see Table Spacing & Background Color below. Cell Justifications You can choose between left, right and center justified text using the buttons on the InfoBar.
Copy (Ctrl+C) Target selection The result with Paste (Ctrl+V) The result with Paste unformatted
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Use the vertical alignment dropdown to choose between top, center or bottom aligned text in the cell. Cell Borders Click the Borders button on the right end of the InfoBar to open the Borders dialog. Borders Dialog First select the cell(s) you want to change as this dialog always works on the selected cells only. In the top Border Filter section of the dialog you first choose which borders you want to change. For example if you want to change only the right side of the whole cell selection, select the filter. Then as you change the border style, width and color in the lower half of the dialog, only that right side border will change. If you want to change all borders of every individual cell in the selection, choose the filter, then again choose the border settings you want. If you have a lot of different border colors, styles and widths in your table, you may have to perform several border changing operations on different cell selections with different Border Filters, but every possible combination of borders on a table is possible! Cell Padding Cell padding is the space you see between the text in a cell and the borders of that cell. In most cases it’s desirable to have some non-zero padding applied, so text doesn’t appear too close to the cell borders.
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Table Spacing & Background Color The table spacing setting lets you add space between all the cells of the table. Most tables tend to have zero spacing, meaning that cell borders overlap with no space between one cell and the next. The color you see in the spaces between cells, blue in the example above, is the Table Background Color. You can change both of these using the Table background color and Spacing between cells options in the Table Properties dialog. Bring up the dialog by clicking the button on the Table Tool InfoBar. You can also set the Table Background Color with a right click on a color in the color line > Set Table Background. Table Properties Header & Footer Rows In the dialog there are options for setting the number of header and footer rows on your table. This information is used when copying and pasting the style of a table from one table to another. To do this select a table and press copy (Ctrl+C). Then select a different table and do Edit > Paste > Paste
4pt spacing  0pt spacing  Table Spacing
Table text with no padding
Table text with 4pt padding
Cell Padding
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format/attributes (Ctrl+Shift+A). Header and footer rows will become much more important once tables can be split across pages and text columns, which is coming soon to the Table Tool! Merging & Splitting Cells Select multiple cells and click the Merge button on the InfoBar, to merge them into a single cell. For example you can easily add a header row to a table by selecting all the cells in the first row and merging them into a single cell. To unmerge/split cells again, select them and click the Split button. Re-order rows & columns You can re-order rows and columns using drag and drop. To move a single row, simply click+drag on the row header. As you drag up/down, a thick blue line shows you where the row will be moved to. To move multiple rows at once, first select the rows (use Ctrl+click and Shift+click to add rows to the selection) then drag on one of the row headers. Similarly you can move columns left/right using the column headers.

External data in Tables

You can copy and paste text and numbers from your spreadsheets and other sources into Xara tables. Simply copy the cells you want to copy in your spreadsheet, then in the Table Tool select a table cell and paste (Ctrl+V). Technical notes: This should work with data from any application that is able to place TSV (Tab Separated Values) as unformatted text onto the clipboard, when you copy it. If you find it doesn’t work with an application you use, please let us know. Support will be added for pasting data from HTML format in a future release.
The mouse pointer is over a row header - click+drag to move the row up/down
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Export to Word & PowerPoint

Xara tables will now appear as editable tables in MS Word, when documents are exported to Word (.docx) format. Xara tables should now also look visually correct in exported MS PowerPoint (.pptx) presentations, but the tables are not currently editable in PowerPoint (text can be edited but the table won’t update).

Convert old tables to new

The old Smart tables will continue working as before, but will not be improved in future. But now with one click you can convert these to new tables, so that you can edit them with the new Table Tool. Whenever you click on an old table, you’ll be asked if you would like it to be converted. You should see that the converted table look almost exactly the same as the old table, although you may see some small differences. The prompt will allow you to refuse the conversion and to turn off future prompts, but we strongly recommend you convert all old tables to new tables when you next need to edit them. Old tables will continue to work for now but may not be supported in future.

Useful Table Shortcuts

Double click on a cell in the Table Tool, to jump to the Text Tool and start adding/editing text in the cell.  When you’ve finished typing in one cell, press Tab to jump to the next cell, or Shift+Tab to move to the previous cell. When you are in the last cell of a table, pressing Tab again will automatically add a new row so you can keep extending the table.  Clear the contents of all selected cells by hitting the Delete key. Delete will also clear the contents of a selected row(s)/column(s), whereas Backspace will delete the row(s)/ column(s). If you are in the Table Tool with a cell selected and you press the Return key, Xara will switch to the Text Tool and place the caret at the end of the text. You can set cell background colors and table background colors using the color line, as well as on the InfoBar. Select the cells, right-click on the color line and choose from the menu. You can drag and drop embedded objects between cells.

User Interface & User Experience

New Look User Interface

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer has a new, clean, modern appearance.
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Key highlights: The new darker background puts more focus on your design, with less user interface distractions There are new, clearer icon designs throughout. All icons and mouse pointers are now High DPI, so they look sharp and clear on high resolution displays And other minor tweaks and improvements - for example in the Page & Layer Gallery, the Page names are now separated from the page thumbnails, so both are clearly visible.

Web Windows to Edge

(Introduced in 19.0.2 the version of 19 sold by Xara, these features are not in v19 if purchased from Magix) There are several functions in Photo & Graphic Designer that bring up a web browser window inside the application, to display content, including:
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The Widget editor

Used when inserting/editing most of the widgets available in the Designs Gallery.

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.

The Designs Gallery

Photo & Graphic Designer includes a starter pack of content, from tables and text panels to social media posts. These are found in the Designs Gallery, which offers a convenient way of importing components and other content into the current document, by simply drag and dropping them from the Gallery onto your document. The Insert menu options insert objects from the Designs Gallery. Note: the Online Content Catalog (now renamed Xara Elements) is only available in the Plus versions of Designer titles. This includes the entire Xara content and component library and is constantly updated as part of the Plus subscription. You can find out more about this content on our Xara Elements page.

Online Help

Photo & Graphic Designer help is now online. The various Help buttons throughout the application now open your default web browser onto the online help system, where you can browse and search the help, just as you could with the locally installed help in earlier versions. Having the help online allows Xara to update it more frequently without having to release application updates, and to integrate it with the online knowledgebase articles.
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Line Gallery

In previous versions of Photo & Graphic Designer when interacting with the Line Gallery for the first time in every session, there was a delay of a few seconds while Xara downloaded all the different brush definitions that are available in the gallery. In some cases this also caused the current selection to be lost. This has now been improved so that each separate brush definitions folder is loaded only if/when needed, so there is no initial delay when using the gallery and the selection is always maintained.

Other UI and UX Improvements

Scrollbar thumbs now more visible against scrollbar backgrounds. 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.

Text & Document Management

Font Menu Improvements

The font menu used to automatically scroll to the current font when opened. This meant that the most useful part of the font menu, the top section that shows the fonts used in the current document, was often out of view. So now the menu always opens with the top of the font menu visible. Some font type icons missing in the menu, on HiDPI displays. Fixed.

Multi-line SmartField Values

SmartFields are another great time-saving feature of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer offering an efficient way to deal with commonly used text phrases that you want to insert in multiple places in text. In this update we’ve added the ability to have multi-line SmartFields. Open the SmartFields dialog (Utilities > SmartFields…), select a SmartField in the list and press the new Edit button, to bring up the multi-line text editor.
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SmartFields can now be multi-line- postal address is a typical example Where a value has more than one line, only the first line is displayed in the dialog and a symbol in the right column indicates that the SmartField has more than one line. You can also click in the right side column to bring up the multi-line editor and see the full multi-line text. Note you can still edit single line values directly in the dialog.

Personal SmartFields

The set of Personal SmartFields in Photo & Graphic Designer (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 Photo & Graphic Designer and Xara Cloud. The new fields in Photo & Graphic Designer 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.

Numbered Lists

Normally when using Numbered Lists, only one number is shown at the start of each list point, as in the left example below. But now there is also the option to show parent numbers too, as shown in the example on the right:
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This new option is available in the List Properties dialog. To show the dialog, place the text caret in a list, right-click and choose List properties … in the context menu.

Change font size and Auto-fit

Auto-fit is a feature on a text area, whereby the font size of the text is set automatically by Photo & Graphic Designer, so that the text fills the text area container exactly. See the vertical text alignment option on the Text Tool InfoBar . This works even when you have a mix of different text sizes - the relative size differences are maintained. However if all the text is the same size, and you don’t realize that auto-fit option is on, it can be confusing. Attempting to change the font size manually will do nothing, because the font size is set automatically. It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re editing a template and don’t realize that auto-fit is on. So now if you attempt to change the font size on all the text in a text box with auto-fit on, auto-fit is turned off automatically, so that the text size change will just work. The same happens with the related Shrink text on overflow option.
	1.	Level 1 point 1 	1.	Level 2 point 1 	2.	Level 2 point 2 	i.	Level 3 point 1 	2.	Level 1 point 2 	1.	Level 2 point 1 	3.	Level 1 point 3 	1.	Level 1 point 1 1.1.	Level 2 point 1 1.2.	Level 2 point 2 1.2.i.	Level 3 point 1 	2.	Level 1 point 2 2.1.	Level 2 point 1 	3.	Level 1 point 3 Previous level numbers OFF Previous level numbers ON
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Handling missing characters

Automatic font selection Xara Photo & Graphic Designer now helps you to find and apply fonts that support characters that are not supported by the majority of Google fonts. For example if you enter or paste a Chinese character such as into text that is using a typical Google Font such as Open Sans, the character won’t appear correctly because Open Sans does not support Chinese characters. Instead you will see or similar in the text. Now when you enter such a character, Xara will check your device for fonts that do support the character. If it finds one, the font will be changed so you should see the character appear correctly. When changing the font automatically in this way, Xara will choose a font that is already being used in the current document where possible, to avoid introducing lots of different fonts. NOTE: Currently this automatic font selection only happens when pasting in unformatted text at the text caret, not when pasting from other formats such as HTML. Go into the Text Tool, place the text caret, select Paste and choose Unformatted text. This will be improved to include all types of paste in a future update. Alternative Font Suggestions If you don’t like the automatically chosen font, select the character(s) in the Text Tool, right-click and you should see a Font Suggestions entry at the top of the context menu. This shows you all the fonts installed on your device that support the first character in your text selection. Font suggestions for selected Chinese character
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You’ll see the selection update to preview the font that is under your mouse pointer, so you can quickly choose which font works best. Google Fonts For Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, Xara will first look for the most popular Google fonts that support the character set, if any are installed on your device. You can find the names of such fonts by searching for them on Google Fonts, using the Language filter, then download and install them onto your device using the Add option in the Google Fonts section of the Fonts menu in the Text Tool of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. Once installed, you should see them in the main Fonts menu and in the Font Suggestions menu described above.

Apply changes across all pages

We’ve added an option to apply page settings changes to all pages. See the Page Size tab of the Utilities > Options dialog. So, for example, this allows you to change the bleed margin settings across all pages of a document, even when the All pages the same option (in the same tab) is off.

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 Text Improvements

Wrong font sometimes applied to text in PDF export. Fixed. Spelling dictionaries updated. Dead accent key handling fixed, when working on text inside smart components. Serious error on starting text edit due to mis-handled font. Fixed. Serious error merging in List Styles on paste/import. Fixed. CID font Noto Sans causes serious error. Fixed. External text pasted into list not added as list items. Fixed. Serious error in flowing document as anchored object flows up. Pasting list items from external source into list, did not add list items. Fixed. Can’t scroll to all pages in Page & Layer Gallery due to new page name position. Fixed. Inconsistent font sizes when pasting same sized text into ‘Shrink on overflow’ text boxes. Fixed. Error when pasting list items into an existing list. Fixed. Scrolling and text editing performance improvements (noticeable with larger documents with many pages). Spelling dictionaries have been added for Ukrainian and Amharic Can’t move text caret between consecutive embedded objects with arrow keys. Fixed.
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Photo & Graphic Design

Selection and the Selector Tool

The following changes have been made to selection handling in response to user feedback and to make selection more consistent across different object types.

Offset handles

Selector Tool transform handles are now offset by a small distance so that they don’t obscure any part of the selected object, or get in the way of any other handles on the object. The offset remains constant for all zoom levels and does not affect object snapping. In addition to the lollipop rotation handle, there are hidden rotate ‘hotspots’ just inside the 4 corner resizing handles (in the offset gap).
Selector Tool handles offset
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Rotate and Skew mode

If you click a second time on an object that is already selected, the selection handles change to show rotation and skew handles. Each time you click, the handles toggle between the two modes. You can also change this mode using the handle on the Selector Tool InfoBar. The skew operation used to rely entirely on dragging hidden handles near the stretch handles or on the InfoBar field, which only skews in one axis. It was too easy to drag the hidden skew handles by accident without realizing it, resulting in unwanted skew effects in a document. So the hidden skew handles have been removed completely and skewing by dragging is now only available in Rotate & Skew mode, using the new visible handles.

SmartShapes & Photos

The Selector Tool only shows SmartShape handles that don’t interfere with the (now offset) transformation handles. This means that the Selector Tool handles now always work consistently, whatever is selected.
Inside rotation hotspot (shown top right) Rotate & skew handles
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The most significant result of this change is that photos can now be scaled and stretched by any of the selection handles. Switch to the Quickshape Tool tool to see all the handles of a SmartShape and to the Photo Tool to see all photo related handles. Double-clicking on a SmartShape now switches to the Quickshape Tool where all its handles are always available, just as double-clicking a photo switches to the Photo Tool. Note the two different effects of dragging photo stretch handles: In the Selector Tool stretching keeps the center of a photo in the center of the object and only scales the photo if it needs to make it fit the new shape. This is the least intrusive way to stretch a photo without distorting it and is appropriate when the photo is being stretched along with other objects. In the Photo Tool stretching the photo shape keeps the photo position fixed and only moves it, or starts to scale it, if required to fill the shape. This is most appropriate when editing a photo on its own.

Stretching & Squashing

Wherever possible, stretching objects will stretch their outer shape and automatically reformat the contents to fit in the stretched shape, without distorting. For example when stretching a rectangular object that has rounded corners, the corners won’t distort, they’ll remain circular. This is called Smart Transformation and it prevents the introduction of unwanted or accidental distortion into documents. However, sometimes you may want to deliberately stretch both an object and its contents (e.g. to stretch/distort a photo or some text). It is now possible to stretch any object, including Text and Photos, by holding down the Alt key to disable
Selector Tool handles Photo Tool handles
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Smart Transformation when dragging the Selector Tool’s stretch handles.

Other Selection Improvements

The Selector Tool now shows the full width of a text column, instead of just the width of text in the column. This makes text columns consistent with text areas/boxes. Serious error dragging Smart Duplicate handle on objects with Push applied. Fixed. Selector Tool handles remain visible even on small objects on screen. Previously some handles were not shown at small on-screen sizes.

Shape Editing Improvements

Another nice improvement for vector illustration has been made to the Shape Tool, is the introduction of
Stretched without Alt key (photo IS NOT distorted) Stretched with Alt key (photo IS distorted)
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an easy way to maintain the angle of the bezier curve when you drag its handles to change its length. Now when dragging a point or curve handle you can hold down Alt to constrain the movement of the handle relative to its original angle with nearby points. It works for both curve handles: (the Shift key can also be used to balance the control handles around the selected smooth point) and point handles in shapes with straight lines: (In this case the Shift key chooses which of the two possible angles connected to the selected point should be used to constrain the angle of the dragged handle. See the Online Help for more details.)

Live Copy Improvements

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 various improvements, which will make working with Live Copies easier and more flexible: Deleting/cutting a Live Copy no longer prompts you to confirm that all instances of the Live Copy should be deleted, as this is rarely needed. Double-clicking on a Live Copy will now always initiate an ‘edit inside’ on the Live Copy. Previously
Alt constrain angles
Alt constrain angles Alt+Shift constrain angles
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this worked for multi-object Live Copies, but not for single object Live Copies. Now when you edit a Live Copy the ‘edit inside’ view shows the design with its original size and orientation, even if the Live Copy has been rotated/scaled. This generally makes editing easier. You can now easily partition a set of Live Copies into two separate sets. In the following example there are 6 instances of the same Live Copy design. Editing any one of them will also change all the others, because they are all part of the same Live Copy set. 1 Live Copy Set But what if you want to make the last 3 look different to the first 3? Now you can simply select the last 3 objects and choose the Live Copy > Make Unique Live Copies option on the right-click context menu. Now you have 2 separate sets of Live Copies, so you can edit one of the last 3 objects to make them different. 2 Live Copy Sets

Make Repeating

Repeating Objects are used where you want the same object to appear on multiple pages of a document, in the same position on each page. They are most commonly used for page headers and page footers. Until now the only way to make an object repeating was to use the Arrange > Repeat on all pages operation. This makes a copy of the object on every single page of the document. This is great if you want the object on every page, but sometimes documents have more than one different page design and you may want one Repeating Object only on some of the pages and perhaps a different Repeating Object on other pages.
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Now there is a new operation Arrange > Make repeating, which simply makes the current selected object into a Repeating Object, without making any additional copies of it on other pages. Once you’ve done this, you can then copy and paste the Repeating Object to whichever pages it’s needed on. Note that you can achieve this very quickly by first selecting the target pages in the Page & Layer Gallery (use Ctrl+click and Shift+click to select multiple pages in the gallery), then paste, and the object will be pasted onto all the pages you selected.

Align Toolbar

The distribute options on the Align Toolbar (Window > Bars > Align) have been changed from Distribute centers, to Distribute equally spaced, which is more commonly used because it works well with objects of different sizes. The Arrange > Alignment dialog still includes the center distribution options.

CMYK Color Profile Control

(First implemented in 19.0.0 but not documented) The Color Profile used to display CMYK colors on screen and on export can now be controlled for each document, via the View tab of the Options dialog.
Distribute horizontally Distribute vertically
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In the Color section of the dialog you can select from the set of standard profiles included with Photo & Graphic Designer, or you can use the Browse… button to select a custom profile. Custom profiles are saved with the document automatically. The set of Color Profiles included in Photo & Graphic Designer has also been updated. The selected profile is used in exported PDF/X files by default, or you can change this in the PDF Export dialog, as before, if you wish to use a different profile.

Other fixes and improvements

Error sometimes shown moving mouse pointer over text inside shape. Fixed. Clipped Opacity Mask Group incorrectly rendered after move. Fixed.
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Opacity mask group on Live Copy rendered wrongly after Live Copy edit. Fixed. Resize of photo filled shape changed shape to rectangle. Fixed. Serious error with repeating objects on guides layer. Fixed. Default photo optimization resolution increased to 300dpi for print documents. Opening color editor onto page color initially shows ‘no color’. Fixed. Applying color to a page no longer turns on page shadow automatically. Page shadow can still be turned on/off in File > Page Options … . FX Painter Tool profile adjustment not working. Fixed. Missing handles in Mold Tool. Fixed. 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. Second and subsequent pastes of the same clipboard contents now work the same way as the initial paste (a list of formats to choose from is shown, if there is a choice). This means if you don’t like the results of the first format you choose, you can simply paste again and choose a different format, without having to re-copy from the source application. Lock icons are now shown in an “unlocked” or “locked” state. Auto-bleed objects now created at full print resolution. Bring to front / Put to back / Move forwards / Move backwards operations now work on objects inside groups. Objects are moved relative to other objects in the same group. Rendering artifacts sometimes visible in auto-bleed bitmaps. Fixed. + handle disappeared on some SmartShape components. Fixed. Serious error when applying elliptical transparency to a group. Fixed

Import & Export

As with every Photo & Graphic Designer release we continue to improve on our industry-leading file format support, the host of small improvements include: Improved AI import, including support for more recent AI versions. PDF form field import/export fixes. SVG file with linear gradient failed to import. Fixed. Overlapping text in exported SVG. Fixed. TIFF import: Support for zip compression added Serious error importing an AI file with missing data. Fixed. PDF Import: Reconstruction of shape outline and shape fill into single shape. Word document caused serious error on import. Fixed. EPS import fix. Docx file caused serious error opening in Photo & Graphic Designer. Fixed. Inserting components via the Insert menu will always brand the components with the current document styles and colors, without asking the user as previously.
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Icon line widths wrong when replaced with SVG. Fixed. Image export setting sometimes changed unexpectedly when page clipping option changed. Fixed. Text copied and pasted from PDF reader has incorrect case. Fixed. Serious error importing SVG file that has embedded WOFF2 fonts. Fixed. Very small objects could cause PDF export to error. Fixed.

Your Purchase Options & Xara Account

Multi-language support

The Designer titles now support English, German, French, Spanish and Dutch. 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).

A New Subscription Option

We’re happy to introduce a brand new subscription option. Our bundle of Xara Designer Pro+ and Xara Cloud is still available if you want to use these 2 great products together (for example if you are collaborating with a team on your documents, or need to access your documents remotely), but there is now also the opportunity to subscribe to just Xara Designer Pro+, Web Designer+ or Photo & Graphic Designer+. Tip: These options offer all the advantages of a subscription model, namely very frequent delivery of new features and content, as they are developed by Xara, and the fastest possible response to new compatibility issues and bug reports. You can always be sure you’ll have the latest version. What’s more the Plus options include the complete library of Xara content, templates and widgets (now called Xara Elements) and come with direct support from Xara, via chat.

Managing Your Xara Account

The new Account menu has options to help you manage your copy of Photo & Graphic Designer.
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Last updated November 21, 2022
Account Details… All copies of Photo & Graphic Designer are associated with both an account email address and a team. This option shows you which account email and team you used to activate Photo & Graphic Designer. Change sign-in details This option lets you update the name or email address in your Xara account. Sign-out Use this if you need to re-activate Photo & Graphic Designer using a different account email or team, for example if you purchased Photo & Graphic Designer using a different email address or team to the one you used to activate the trial before purchase. Team Profile More information on the team that your copy of Photo & Graphic Designer is associated with. Users & Permissions… For managing your team members if your team includes more than 1 person. Billing & Plans Information on your current plan. Downloads Where you can re-download your copy of Photo & Graphic Designer.