Customizing the Xara workspace

[Gare]

If you use Window>Control Bars, and then scroll down and check "Arrange", you can display a control bar above the Standard Bar that allows you easy access to important operations. But you can also put Boolean operation right on your Standard Bar—we run at least 1024 width onscreen these days, and there's a lot of vacant space on this control bar.

Boolean operations—you know, "subtract the overlapping parts of this object from that object"—is something you probably need to do every day to get the shape you need. There's no reason why you shouldn't have the Arrange>Combine Shapes commands as buttons right there on the Standard toolbar, huh?

To do this, you go to Window>Control Bars. Then scroll down to Button Palette and check the box. The palette opens and what you want to do is if you're not familiar with the icons, hover your cursor to get tool tips going. Hold Shift+Alt and then click-drag the Boolean buttons and anything else that looks useful to the Standard toolbar, then drop them into place. You can also lose the redo and undo buttons to make space; hold Shift+Alt, drag them off the toolbar, drop them onto the page and they go away (you can put them back at any time from the Button Palette.

I think this is a smart way to work! I even put the Options wrench button on the toolbox above the 3D Extrude button so I can redefine nudge distance and page size with only a click or two.

More shortly,

Gare

[Gare]

To use color in Xara, you have the Color Editor for whipping up a local color; colors you want a part of a permanent collection must be named—with a color defined in the Color Editor, click the tag icon, and then name the color. It now appears at the far right of the color line, but you can drag the swatch to any position you want.

To add collections to the Color Gallery, if you have a legitimate *.ACO or *.PAL file, you can put it in the Xara>Palettes folder. Then to have it display on the color line, you right click the folder name in the Color Gallery and choose Show in Color Line.

But I'm slumming it today, to share a collection of lively and earthy tones. Download the zip file, open it in Xara, and then choose File>Save Template.

Then if you want to work with these colors, you choose File>New and then choose the name of the template (you saved). Colors are local to documents unless you put palettes in the Palettes folder.

Oh, by the way, press Ctrl+Shift+O and then on the View tab, uncheck •Delete Unused colors when saving and loading. Saving docs with a small color line (palette) only saves marginally on file size, me? I like colors to work with off the color line, and don't feel the line is too wide if you save a lot of colors. That's why God created scroll bars.

My Best,

Gary