Some major enhancements to chart support, including the long awaited introduction of Line Charts. Plus we've added some very flexible new controls over the appearance of bar & column charts.
A quick and easy way to add a background color to your text that fills the full width of the text column, great for headings and highlighting text. And since it’s a popular style in Microsoft Word and Google Docs it means even better results when importing documents in that format.
A new auto-bleed feature for PDF/X output, which extends any object touching the edge of the page into the bleed area, giving better commercial print results.
Another great time saver: Configure a Smart Field for any repeating text string in your document that’s likely to change, and then you’ll only have to update its value once, in the Smart Field dialog. For example, you might create a Smart Field called ‘price’ or ‘link to offer’.
Most Open Type fonts include stylized characters that allow you to add interest and impact to your text. It could be a flourish that adds a certain elegance, or a simple and bold text effect that draws attention to a key statement.
Used successfully they are a sure sign of a professional designer, and will make your design eye-catching and memorable.
Specifically, we have added support for:
We have also made some significant performance improvements.
Text Panels
A large selection of new and very flexible text panels - the best way to highlight important text in a range of documents from brochures to websites.
Plus all Text Panels now support vertical alignment and text auto-fit.
Photo Panels and Frames
More than 30 new photo panels and a new category of photo frames, offering a host of new options for displaying your images to best effect – one of the most common requirements for all forms of document design.
More than 30 new ultra-editable SmartShapes, including trapezoid and parallelogram - geometric shapes that are popular building blocks for designs from brochures and flyers to cards and websites. We've also added braces (brackets).
Really smart lines! The line length adjusts as you enter a label, and if it’s a valid measurement unit it will set the line length. Great for headings & dividers, labels for technical drawings and floating rulers!
Basic tables were introduced in v15 but they've taken a big steps forward in v16.
Like all SmartShapes editing is visual and interactive: you can use simple drag and drop to arrange the table, add or remove columns, adjust the width and height of rows and columns or the whole table, re-arrange rows, adjust spacing and cell padding. It's now an ultra-flexible table tool. Improvements include:
Designer Pro includes ‘Website M’ hosting (worth 1.99 USD a month), free for one year. This includes 2GBytes of free web hosting space and one free domain name (e.g. yourname.com or .co.uk or .de etc). Plus if you publish with Website M you can password protect your web pages.
You can view previews of a selection of the themes and other templates in the Online Content Catalog.
Designer Pro benefits from seamless integration with Xara Cloud, which makes it a great additional service.
Xara Cloud is an ultra-simple way to edit and share your Xara documents and websites online in a web browser, using any computer or tablet. The Premium version of Xara Cloud also gives you the ability to work on Xara documents and sites or Xara Cloud templates in collaboration with friends, colleagues and clients, commenting and editing together in real-time.
Xara Cloud is being constantly enhanced, and new features are made available as and when they are ready - you can find news of the very latest updates here.
You can find out more about the Free and Premium Xara Cloud options & register here.