Photo Design & Useability Enhancements Web Authoring / Web Publishing Other Minor Enhancements

Photo

Photo Magic Erase Tool

There is a new 'magic' erase feature, which can quickly and seamlessly erase unwanted objects from photos. Just draw around the feature or object you want removed, then one click on the 'magic erase' button and the object is automatically erased and replaced with an appropriate background texture sampled from other parts of the photo. This can often work better than any manual clone and can produce perfectly seamless object erasing.

See some examples

Photo Clipart

There's a new 'photo clipart' category in the Designs Gallery, handy for DTP work from brochures and adverts to posters and packaging. You can see some examples here.

Design & Useability Enhancements

Cut, copy & paste of whole pages

You can now cut, copy and paste whole pages both within and between documents. This copies the page dimensions, layers and other page attributes in addition to all the objects on the page.

Improved anchoring of graphics & repelling text

If you are using Designer for page layout you'll appreciate these significant improvements to anchoring and repelling. Creating anchored objects is now a one-click action, and objects that you anchor in text now also repel text, helping you easily create a smooth flow around effect. Repel margins can also now be defined separately for the margin width and height. And anchored objects can be constrained to move vertically only, which is very useful where you have objects to the right or left of the text that need to move only up and down. All of which helps to make the anchoring and repelling features more flexible and much easier to use.

Improved page management

  • A new default Page & Layer Gallery ‘pages’ mode displays a narrow list of page thumbnails – for quick and easy page selection, access and management (a real time saver, especially in combination with the new fly-out galleries).
  • Designer initially displays an uncluttered single page view. Use the Page & Layer Gallery to quickly move to different pages, or switch to multi-page view by right clicking on the page and selecting the multi-page view option on the menu.

Fly-out galleries for instant viewing and flexible docking

A new gallery bar gives instant access to all galleries, which now fly out as you hover the mouse pointer over a new gallery bar. It's easy to move galleries around the workspace, and you can pin and dock them wherever you want, either individually or in groups or 'stacks' on top of each other. You'll find it makes a significant improvement to workflow.

Export animation documents as AVI files

Designer now allows you to export any animation or non-animation document as an AVI file, or even an AVI with transparency, helping you create your own web-ready movie content.

Quick alignment of selected objects

Quick alignment of selected objects is made possible by the new right click menu option 'Align'. This enables you to directly align multiple objects horizontally and vertically, without having to open the alignment dialog.

Edit inside groups and other composite objects

At last a really easy way of editing grouped objects and adding new objects into an existing group.  Double-click on a group or other composite object to edit it in a separate document window, simply click save when you’re done.

Brand new ‘magic snap’ for object alignment

Designer now provides ‘magic’ magnetic object snapping. As you drag an object, it ‘snaps’ to points and lines of interest nearby and indicates what it has snapped to by displaying dynamic snap lines and points.  This makes it easy to align objects with each other, and/or (at the same time) with guidelines, the grid, the page center or edges. You'll soon wonder how you ever managed without it!

Non-axis aligned snapping

You can now also align to lines that are neither vertical or horizontal.

Tabbed document windows

Tabs at the top of the Designer window show at a glance all the currently open documents, which document you are currently viewing, the document type and whether there are unsaved changes. Switch documents by simply clicking on the document tab.

New paste operations

New paste operations bring much more flexibility to pasting operations, allowing Paste position, Paste size, Paste replacing selection (replaces the selected object with the copied object), Paste in current layer and Paste in place in current layer.

Web Authoring / Web Publishing

Intelligent repeating headers / footers / watermarks

Designer now automatically updates all occurrences of a repeating object when you edit it, so you don't have to manually update when you make a change. When one instance of a repeating object is edited, the updates appear instantly on all other instances of that object on other pages of the document. What’s more, Designer is smart about positioning, so objects in the top half of the page are positioned on other pages relative to the top of the page, and objects near the bottom are positioned relative to the bottom of the page, irrespective of page sizes.

Built-in preview window now includes navigation buttons

The navigation buttons in the top bar of the preview window allow you to move back or forward, just like in a web browser, and the Home button returns you to the page you started the preview on.

Quickly preview your pages in all the most popular web browsers

If you have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or Chrome installed, you can preview exactly how your page will appear in each of these popular web browsers with a single click.

Preview your web page in full screen

You can now preview your web page in full screen by clicking the new View Full Screen button in  Designer's built-in Preview window. When you next use preview, Designer remembers the last used mode (normal, maximized or full screen). and displays subsequent previews in the same way.

Other Minor Enhancements

Other improvements include:

  • Greater control over clipping objects to page. A new option in the Website tab of the Website Properties dialog allows you to choose whether or not to clip objects to web page edges. If you do not clip, then any objects overlapping your page on to the pasteboard will be displayed in full, rather than cropped to the page border. In addition, any animated transitions you apply will now start from the browser window edge rather than the page border.
  • Improved context sensitive menus. There are some new context sensitive menus which give direct access to useful actions. Right-click on objects, page or pasteboard for instant access to many useful operations relevant to the object.
  • Clearer InfoBar text rendering. Brings greater screen display quality and clarity to all Designer toolbars, if ClearType text is enabled in your Window's control panel.
  • New Photo Optimize Dialog Control. The Optimize Photo dialog now includes the option to maintain the photo’s current resolution.
  • Text repelling within layers. You can now prevent objects on the current layer from repelling text on other layers using the new "Text repelling within layer" option in the Layer Properties dialog. This option also stops text on the current layer being repelled by objects on higher layers. This is useful for (and is set by default on) popup layers in web documents.
  • New languages added to the spell checker:  Czech, Polish, Slovak, Turkish and Hungarian.
  • Further improvements to the PDF import filter.
  • Improved EPS import reliability.
  • New cameras supported for RAW import.