Xara Designer Pro

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Xara Designer Pro

XaraLX-Icon.png
Xara Xtreme LX.png
Vector graphics program
Basic data

developer Xara Group Ltd.
Current  version 0.7 rev1692
operating system Windows
programming language C ++
category Vector graphics program
License proprietary and GNU General Public License
German speaking Yes
xara.com

Xara Designer Pro (formerly Xara Xtreme ) is a vector-based graphics and drawing program . It is made by the British software company Xara Group Ltd. which has been a 100% subsidiary of the German Magix AG since January 30, 2007 .

Xara Designer Pro offers a high processing speed , which is achieved by programming in assembler in Xara's renderer .

The history of development

  • In 1992, the first forerunner of Xara Xtreme appeared under the name ArtWorks on an Acorn Archimedes 32-bit RISC computer and ran under its RISC OS operating system . The manufacturer, which at the time was still operating under the name Computer Concepts , later stopped developing the RISC OS version and from then on concentrated on the Windows version, initially called Xara Studio , but transferred the rights to further develop ArtWorks to the German developer Martin Würthner, who has since developed the RISC OS variant as an independent version and sells it to this day.
  • From 1995 to 2000 Corel sold the software under the name CorelXARA
  • From 2000, the software was back by the manufacturer under the name Xara X sold.
  • In 2004, the Xara X¹ version followed with functions for prepress.
  • The current version, Xara Xtreme , was released in 2005. The prepress functions have now become an exclusive feature of the later Pro version (see below).
  • In October 2005, Xara Ltd. announced to port Xara Xtreme to the Linux and macOS operating systems and to publish the source code of Xara Xtreme under the terms of the GNU General Public License .
  • In November 2006 the manufacturer released the product Xara Xtreme PRO . In addition to the prepress, which is separated from Xara X¹, it contains other exclusive functions such as multi-page documents, RAW import / PDF export and others, and the Xara 3D animation program.
  • On January 30, 2007, the German Magix AG (now Magix GmbH & Co. KGaA) took over Xara Groups Ltd. to 100 %. The end-user products are sold by Magix GmbH & Co. KGaA, the products aimed at professional users will continue to be sold by Xara Group Ltd. expelled.
  • In 2009 Magix published the Magix Web Designer program, software for creating websites. In 2011 this program was supplemented by a premium version with an extended range of functions.
  • In 2010, Xara Xtreme Pro was renamed Xara Designer Pro.
  • In 2013 Magix published the Magix Page & Layout Designer program for creating printed matter.

Different program versions

Five different program versions are currently being published:

Xara Designer Pro
is the proprietary full version for the Windows operating system.
Magix Photo & Graphic Designer
a version especially optimized for editing photos.
Magix Web Designer
a version especially optimized for the creation of websites.
Magix Page & Layout Designer
a version optimized for DTP applications.
Magix 3D Maker
a version specially optimized for creating 3D graphics

Open source version of Xara Xtreme

On October 11, 2005, Xara Ltd. started developing an open source version of Xara Xtreme for the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems . On March 20, 2006 the developer version 0.3 was finally released under the GPL . Initially, it only allowed graphics to be loaded in the company's own .XAR file format. From version 0.5, the open source version also had functions for saving. With the current version 0.7, Xara Xtreme also has functions for importing SVG files.

Only the Linux version will be developed and released as an open source version. Since the Windows version contains licensed code from other manufacturers (plugins), the Windows version is still distributed under a proprietary license.

The manufacturer has announced a collaboration with the open source vector graphics program Inkscape to jointly develop a powerful free vector program for Linux.

According to ongoing information from Pro-Linux from 2007, 100% implementation as an open source version after the takeover by Magix is ​​currently unlikely and the future of the open source project is uncertain (the proprietary version is not affected ).

Web links

References

  1. xaraxtreme.org .
  2. http://www.xara.com/eu/history/ History of Xara (English version)
  3. http://www.xara.com/eu/outsider/ Xara Outsider newsletter archive (English version)
  4. http://www.xara.com/eu/products/localised/de/ List of Xara products
  5. http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2007/11655.html