Content-Aware Scaling

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.

A new Object Gallery

The Object Gallery is a powerful and flexible tool for viewing, re-ordering, hiding and locking layers and 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.

This is a new and intuitive way to manage layers, and also to organize pages (for example re-ordering them).

Spell Check as you type

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.

Other Text Tool Enhancements

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.

A new Object Masking system allows parts of a drawing or photo to be marked for operations such as delete, clip, copy. Or, in conjunction with Content-Aware photo scaling, to protect parts of a photo during a stretch.
The Transparency Tool now supports multi-stage graduated transparencies (works rather like multi-stage graduated color fills).
Soft Groups: A new type of object grouping that allows groups to contain objects across different layers.
Enhanced multi-page support (pages can be different sizes and have different layers, and there's easier page copying, re-ordering and deletion via the Object Gallery).
Improved EPS and Adobe Illustrator import and export.
Improved PDF import and export (including support for PDF 1.7, links to pages and anchors, mouseover pop-up titles, default document link color and embedded Flash).

Improved Flash export

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.

Copy / paste now retains layers.
A new photo temperature control (warmer or cooler) and easier photo clipping.
A new, integrated red-eye tool for removing red-eye from photos.
Updated RAW photo support for more recent digital cameras.

Other Photo Tool enhancements

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.

A new screen capture utility.
Direct page resize by dragging the page edges, both horizontally and vertically.
Repeating objects, ideal for headers and footers or repeating logos across all (or some) of the pages in multi-page documents.
Easier object naming and name handling via a new Name dialog.
A new sub menu File > Open Recent now displays recently used documents for easy access (default 20).
File->New menu expanded to allow up to 20 template documents
Stretching of rounded rectangles now retains the corner radius. Which means no more stretched corners!
Improved 'rapid sketching' support for the Freehand Tool.
A large number of new templates including all the Web Designer web themes.