Xara Xtreme

This fast and responsive vector software now features a plug-in architecture

Xara’s latest upgrade to its Xara X vector illustration package is not over-burdened by flighty new features. Instead, the innovative developer has concentrated on making the software perform faster and improving existing functions.

If you’ve not tried Xara before, prepare to be astounded. The program renders even the most complex arrangements of shapes and fills on-screen at ultra-high quality. The context-sensitive user interface also turns challenging tasks into no-brainers: feathering, gradient fills, transparency and so on are all applied interactively in real time by dragging handles or sliders.

Xara claims that Xara Xtreme runs around eight times faster than Adobe Illustrator, and having spent some time with the program we agree. This rendering speed allows Xtreme to display objects as solids rather than outlines while editing and dragging them around. Switching to Xtreme from Illustrator, FreeHand or CorelDraw is a liberating experience.

The new release introduces a couple of important new features. Xara Xtreme has been re-engineered to support a system of effects plugins, and comes supplied with effects from the likes of Alien Skin and Eye Candy. These include some clever mosaic, crumple and fur effects that can be applied to your vector designs and updated in real time as you edit.

In principle, Xara Xtreme should also be compatible with a variety of Photoshop plug-ins, although our tests proved otherwise. None of the effects in Photoshop CS2’s Filter Gallery seemed compatible.

Another important change in this upgrade is support for PDF 1.4 export, which allows gradient and transparent fills to be saved to PDF in their native vector format, rather than rastered (flattened) to bitmap areas. This greatly improves compatibility with Illustrator and allows you to produce resolution-independent artwork that can be placed into QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign pages without having to risk the ever-unreliable EPS format.

Other enhancements include support for Copy and Paste between Xtreme and Xara3D, the ability to apply common transparency values across grouped objects, and a useful red-eye removal tool for use within the bundled Xara Picture Editor utility.

The floating ‘gallery’ palettes can now be docked to the edge of the program window, although this area of the program interface remains clumsy to use and ugly to look at.

Xara Xtreme can’t replace the likes of Illustrator: its tracing feature, though fast, is no comparison to Live Trace, there are no symbol or object style facilities and very limited distortion envelope options. Yet for creating clean, photo-realistic vector artwork with the minimum of effort, there’s no program we’d rather use.

The sheer simplicity of Xara Xtreme when working with gradient fills, transparency and shadows, not to mention gorgeous bevels and perfect anti-aliased output, make this program a joy to use.