Re: Advice sought on a replacement program

A lot of work indeed. My dopey sister managed to completely knacker her laptop a few years ago and there wasn't a recovery partition on it. I ended up downloading a Win 7 ISO image, burned it onto a disk then loaded it up to her laptop (the easy part like you said). I then spent many hours on my own PC downloading drivers just to get her sound and graphics cards working and then her USB and Ethernet so she could get back online. A solution not for the faint-hearted, would be better to try some of the alternative programs suggested in this thread.

Re: Advice sought on a replacement program

Have you tried GIMP? It is free and open source but a very comprehensive graphics program with ooodles of tutorials on Youtube. It describes itself:

GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.

Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Re: Advice sought on a replacement program

I'll have to install the new version of Gimp and give it a go. I haven't read that it has vector capabilities though and so it might not make a good equivalent to the program Mr Magoo has been using, or perhaps quite so suitable for producing the same kind of results?

Gimp and other raster/photo programs are a different kind of program to Xara Xtreme. True that Xara Photo & Graphic Designer includes photo editing functions but it is still primarily a vector drawing program ..and a good one at that.

Xara, Inkscape, CorelDraw, Affinity Designer and other similar programs are more suited to rescaling, resizing images upwards and downwards. Also dragging images and shapes around on the same canvas until precisely in the right place at the required size. Gimp and other raster editing programs can do some of that but have drawbacks when it comes to shaping, moulding ..plus creating shapes and images.

Best to have both types of program installed probably. Just use either depending on the type of result needed.

https://graphicmama.com/blog/vector-...he-difference/

Re: Advice sought on a replacement program

I have now installed inkscape. Imagine my delight when the it all looked so familiar. It has the look and feel of Xara. No doubt it does less but I really don't want to do much.

Thank you all for your prompt advice.

Re: Advice sought on a replacement program

I'm pleased you are pleased Mr Magoo. I think Inkscape will do everything that Xara did but finding the tools to do it within the Interface can ne a bit involved sometimes.

There are lots of tutorials, advice and tips to be found on the Internet (including YouTube). If you have any difficulty in getting the program to do what you want it to do, just type a few keywords into a search engine accompanied by the word 'inkscape' and lots will usually come up about it.

I find it doesn't open .xar files successfully. If you have any graphics in that file format, it will probably be necessary to redraw the graphics from scratch in Inkscape. I note from a search that there are converters available but I haven't tried any.