5

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.

The Object Gallery in Xtreme Pro is a 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 heirarchical, expandable list - at the top level are the pages, and inside each page are the named layers of the document. In Xtreme Pro this is taken to a further level, showing all the objects on the page. The Gallery provides thumbnail views of all objects.

The Object Gallery makes it easy to find, select, lock or hide objects inside complex drawings, or objects inside groups or even hidden under other objects on the page.

Xara Xtreme 5 now includes all the web features recently introduced in Xara Web Designer, making Xtreme a first class web authoring tool in its own right. The many improvements include:

• Complete freeform WYSIWYG web page design - no layout rules
• One click preview, and one click publishing to your web server
• Automatic photo re-sampling and photo optimization
• Full support for CSS layers including transparency effects
• Pop-ups and mouseover effects. Automatic photo thumbnails with pop-ups
• Support for thousands of web page widgets (e.g. embedded movies, Google maps, RSS feeds, forms etc)
• Website wide or per page title, keyword, description and tracker code
• A large range of new web page templates, with easy theme coloring, photo replacement etc
• Cross browser, cross platform compatible, fully standards compatible (X)HTML

Xtreme 5 includes a multi-language spell checker offering check-as-you-type, word suggestions and a user-dictionary. You can even mark different regions as being in different languages.

Supported languages include English (US and UK), German (Germany, Swizterland and Austria), Italian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.

• Automatic Font Embedding. You can send a document using any fonts to any other Xtreme or Web Designer user and they will see exactly what you see, fonts and all (even if they do not have the fonts installed on their computer)
• Anchored text objects. You can tie graphic objects to be anchored to a specific spot in your text and they will move as the text flows
• Improved font selection menu. Now with three sections for used fonts, web safe fonts and other fonts. Plus instant, live font size preview when selecting fonts and font size
• Link underline made more intelligent and improved link color control (global site-wide and ability to override on a per link basis)
• Text syncing of Soft Groups so all identical text strings in a soft group get updated when one is changed (this is how multi-layer button editing is done and it's also useful in Flash templates)
• Improved button and heading stretching
• 'Windows Compatible Font rendering' mode (to adjust font metrics to emulate the incorrect Windows font rendering used by Windows browsers)
• Better more reliable replacing, or pasting, of selected regions. Takes on style of paste point
• Better replacement of selected text line (e.g. triple click line and type, now does not replace CR)
• Double-click on text takes you into the Text Tool
• All fonts on screen are now rounded to whole pixels in web documents, to match the behaviour of web browsers
• Selecting small text with the Selector Tool has been improved
• It's now easy to put rotated text back exactly upright, from any angle, by holding Ctrl while rotating.

There have been many small enhancements to the Flash feature making it more flexible and even easier to use. These include:

• 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
• Bitmap blur/sharpen supported natively as a Flash transform (i.e you can tween photo blur values)
• You can now also tween saturation and color temperature
• Direct page (Flash Animation) resize by dragging on bottom edge or right edge
• Ability to control JPEG compression for all photos in a Flash file
• You can now jump to frames on a mouseover (as well as clicks) so you can control animation on mouseover
• Flash movies now restart on pop-ups or mouseover pop-ups each time the pop-up appears (rather than carry on from where it last was)
• Improved tweening error messages.

A large number of other smaller changes have been made to photo handling and the Photo Tool, making it quicker, easier and more productive to work with photos. These include:

• Drag n drop a photo will now give the option of replacing all instances of that photo
• Direct crop in the Photo Tool (ie no need to go into crop mode)
• Easier crop adjustment - 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 photo in Fill Tool now re-positions it (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)
• Content aware image resize
• Enhanced Liquid Color user interface
• 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.