This page provides descriptions of, and download links for, the best shareware and freeware produced by Xara users for Xara users. These mini-applications and plug-in filters vastly enhance Xara’s capabilities

If you have created a plug-in filter or a mini-application that you would like to share with the Xara community contact us and provide a description of your Xara helper.

XaReg - New Update 1.0.2.0 — Supports Xara Web Designer and Xtreme 5.0 is a simple utility that changes registry settings for Xara versions Xara X through Xtreme 4.0. and new Xara Web Designer Coded by Bill Taylor (Soquili) and UI Design by Steve Ledger (Sledger).

New features in XaReg 1.0.2.0:

New interface compared to XaReg 1.0.1.4 Support for Xtreme 5.1 Pro Object Gallery: Ability to modify the Selection Color, modify Deactivation Color ( the text color within the Gallery for hidden or locked objects and/or layers), modify Stripe Color (alternate lines in the Object Gallery can have a different background color).

Support for Xtreme 5.1 Standard and Pro: Ability to adjust the time delay for Auto Connect for lines when using the Freehand and Brush Tool. The default time delay is 500 milliseconds. Ability to disable node display when using the Freehand and Brush Tool (Auto Deselect).  Ability to change the Freehand and Brush Tool cursor to crosshair (same as in Xara X released in 2000). These options are at the bottom of the Blobs page in XaReg.  Images that hopefully describe the different Blob size options.  Selection Blobs are for the Shape Editor Tool.  Multi Stage Selection Blobs are for the Fill Tool.  Fill Blobs Hit Detect determine how close you can drop fill handles. Freehand Tool End Hit Detect determine the pixel distance between start and end nodes that will automatically close the shape.

Launch the selected version of Xtreme or Web Designer when you exit XaReg by putting a check in the "Launch Selected Version" check box at the bottom of the XaReg interface.  You must exit using either the Exit button beside the check box or the File Menu > Exit option.

Also new since XaReg 1.0.1.4 is the Max Import Bitmap size options on the Bitmap page of XaReg.  Web Designer and Xtreme 5.1 (Standard and Pro versions) default to resizing imported raster images to 500 pixels wide.  You can either turn off the resize by unchecking the Resize to pixel size check box. Or you can select a pixel size by selecting a number from the drop down list or typing in a number of your choice and hitting the Enter key.

SUPPORT THIS PRODUCT: XaReg is now a Donation-ware program. Steve and Bill have put a tremendous amount of time and effort into this useful utility. You can ensure continued development and support for this utility by making a small donation. There is a PayPal Donate button found in the About tabbed section. If you use Xareg and think it is helpful, please make a small donation to make sure it continues to grow and improve.

Click here to download XaReg 1.0.2.0. (Updated June 2009)

Bill’s Palette (Soquili) contains a .pal file that contains 375 named colours. The names and specs for the colors comes from the Wikipedia article List of Colors and some of the linked articles about shades of colors. Download the zip file to your computer and extract the pal file to a folder. Copy or move the pal file to your C:\ Program Files/Xara/your installed version/Palettes folder.

To download Bill’s Palette and for more information see this TalkGraphics thread.

Keith’s Colors Palette - Keith (ss-kalm) has created a masterful palette of named colors. These colors open on the color line and provide a smooth rainbow of of almost 500 colors. If you save this page as a template, new pages created with this template will display these colors on the screen palette. Click here to download the file. For more information see this thread in the TalkGraphics Xtreme Conference.

xxfx from Lloyd (sculptex) A standalone application to create Xara file content that would be too time consuming or fiddly to create in Xara itself (such as the logo shown above).

Plus additional complementary features, including:

• Processing of bitmaps to create an approximated vector dot field equivalent
• Creation of vector mono dot halftone-like  gradients
• Post processing of Xara created websites to insert into ebay listings (strips out all headers, optional upload of images to your  own web space and renaming of images)
• Basic table creation feature
• Simple search and replace of text strings (useful  for creating multiple labels etc. from a template)"

Click here to download the Zipped file.(1.12 MB)

Dmitry Malutin’s MicroScan Now you can scan images into Xtreme. Well, almost. MicroScan is a stand-alone utility that locates and activates your scanner and scans the image. The scanned bitmap is automatically placed in the clipboard and can be pasted (Ctrl v) into Xtreme. Quick Scan launches a scan of your entire scanner window in B/W, Grayscale or RGB and at resolutions ranging from 75-2400dpi. Custom Scan launches your scanners own utility and gives you more options. Scanned images may also be saved in several file formats. Click here to download MicroScan. Download the Zipped file, double click on the icon and install the program.

A big thank you to Dmitry for this and all of his excellent Xara utilities. Click here to visit Dmitry’s website.

Dmitry Malutin’s raster Paste photos into raster and then create rasterized images. raster converts the photo into vector dots (you determine the size) so fast you won’t believe it happened! There are a variety of settings. Experiment. And have fun! Click here to download raster.zip.

Click here to visit Dmitry’s website.

Dmitry Malutin has done it again. He has updated his popular X Tune utility to support Xara Xtreme Pro (and Xtreme + versions X and X1). It’s easy to use. Just download the ZIP file, extract the program and place it where you can find it. No install is necessary. Just double click and you’re ready to go. XX Tube makes changes to Xara’s registry settings so you don’t have to.

Xara XX Tune can save a BAK backup file every time you save your file. Blob size refers to the size of the control handles. A big thank you to Dmitry for this invaluable contribution. Click here to download the file. (24K)
 

Bill Taylor’s Photo Drag and Drop the Old Way FIX: One of the dubious workflow improvements in Xtreme and Xtreme Pro versions 3.2 + is a change in the behavior when a photo is applied as a bitmap to a shape or another photo. In the good old days, when you applied a photo as a fill or dragged and dropped a photo onto another photo to change it, the fill or dropped image retained the proportions of the previous photo. Now any time you apply a bitmap as a fill or drag and drop it onto a photo or shape, the photo automatically resizes to the maximum height or width.

There is a Registry fix suggested in this recent Xtreme Conference thread by Phil from Xara. It involves resetting certain settings in the mysterious Registry, something that should not be done unless you know what you are doing. This is where Bill Taylor (Soquili) comes in to save us all.

For those that would prefer not to personally edit the registry the attached  ResetFillBehavior.zip file contains a .reg file.

Unzip the .reg to a folder on your hard drive. Using Windows Explorer or My Computer  double click on the file's icon.

You will be asked if you want to add the information to the  Registry.

Answer YES and the changes will be made for you.

Answer  NO and the changes will not be made.

Simple enough. Click here to download the file. Thanks Bill. We owe you!

Ron Muncy has created a screen saver from the Flash Animation July 2007 Xara Xtreme Tutorial. Download the Zip file, then follow the instructions in the Read me text file. Click here to download the file. (!.07MB)

Back by Popular Demand - A Utility to Restore the Spacebar = Selector Tool/Last Selected Tool Function! From version 3.2 onwards, holding down the space bar in Xara Xtreme and Xara Xtreme Pro causes a temporary switch to the Push Tool. Releasing the Space bar returns to the previously selected tool or pressing it once will switch to the push tool and pressing it again will return to the previous tool.

You can restore the old use of the space bar as a shortcut to the Selector tool.

Xara Xtreme 3.2

Download CopyHotkeysIni
Extract the contents of the zip file
Double click the copyHotkkeysIni.bat

Xara Xtreme Pro 3.2

Use the Xtreme Pro 3.2 Shortcuts Utility This has been covered in some detail on Page 5 (near the bottom of the page) in Workbook 60.

ALL IS NOT LOST!!! Many of us has experienced the frustration of not being able to open a XAR file that for some mysterious reason has become corrupted. Well, all may not be lost. Gerry I from the Xara Ltd. Development Group has come up with something that might recover part or all of your corrupted file. It is called Expander.XAR. Here’s how it works.

Extract the ExpanderXar.exe program from the archive (the ZIP file) to the same folder as the bad *.xar file.

Select Start\Run and type cmd and hit Return (Enter).

Change directory to the correct folder, for example cd C:\MyXarFiles (cd is the command to change the directory to the folder (path name) where your corrupt file is languishing.

Run the utility by keying in: expandxar mybadfile.xar output.xar

If an output file is generated (output.xar in the above case) then try loading it into Xtreme, ignoring warnings about unrecognized tags.
If it loads and you want to keep the recovered data then re-save the document where ever you like. Click here to download the ZIPped archive expander.xar (69K).

German Keyboard Shortcuts - Tomcat has created a chart of all the Xara keyboard shortcuts in German with instructions for making a 3-sided stand up card for easy viewing. Click here to download 1 ZIP file of 2 Flash SWF files (68K). If you need to download the latest Flash Player, click here.

Frantisek Grebenicek has created a Java based utility SpiroJ that creates circular patterns like the one shown above. To run this you need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.4.x or later (Sun Microsystems JRE 1.4.2 is recommended) which you can download here. Unzip the contents to a new folder. Open the folder, find the SpiroJ.jar file and double click the icon. Click the New Default Design icon to start and press the Calc button to apply your changes. Click Export to export the design. Ignore the error message when you import the file into Xara. There is an HTML file in the DOC folder if you need documentation. Click here to download SpiroJ (184K)

(January 07) Dmitry Malutin had added more refinements for his Font Seeker a utility that lists all the installed fonts on your computer. Key in some sample text, then every font you select is shown with your text. JUST ADDED You can drag and drop a font sample onto the page. Then copy and paste the attributes to any selected text. You can also select fonts by Character Sets, Font Type and Style in the expanded menu. Because this utility changes frequently, and because there are many more terrific free utilities at Dmitry’s website, this link will take you directly to Dmitry’s site. Click here to download (186K).

SPRAY is yet another really cool utility created by Dmitry Malutin. Use it to generate a wide variety of objects, shapes, and line patterns. Then copy your creation and paste it into Xara where you can modify it. The image of the bubbles represents the latest version which in this case creates hundreds of different size circles, none of which touch. The bubbles on the left were created in Xara simply by copying attributes from one circle and then pasting attributes to all the other circles. Click here to download (376K).

Xeus Bitmap Corrector created by John Horn (covoxer) is a Photoshop® filter plug-in. It is bitmap editing addon to Xara X. Xeus (pronounced Zeus) lets you do raster painting right in you favorite vector drawing software! If you are tired having to leave Xara to use bitmap editors everytime you want to alter an image try Xeus and you'll see the difference.
Xeus can be used with any other graphic application that supports Photoshop compatible plug-ins.

UPDATE: John Horn has generously decided to make Xeus Bitmap Corrector a freeware product. If you download the utility, and you find it useful, send John an e-mail and let him know. Creating Xeus is a LOT of work!

Click here to go to the Xeus home page where you can get more information and download your free 7-day trial version. (710K) Click here for tutorials.
 

John W. Horn (covoxer in the Xara Conference) has created a handy utility, XetupX and lets users edit a variety of Xara’s default registry settings in a simple, easy to use interface. Included are options to change: Handle size and color, arrowhead size, the font size on the screen rulers, the raster size of generated fractals, color settings, mouse settings, create backup file, PostScript level default, and more. Xetup works with Xara X1, Xara X, and CorelXara 2.0. There is no Apply button but changes are applied as you make them. The default settings are displayed in a Tool Tip in case you want to revert back to Xara’s default settings.

NEW VERSION 1.2 - 27 Sept 04 Now XetupX does periodic backups of your Xara files. For this to happen, Xara must be the active window and XetupX must remain open (you can minimize the utility). Click here to download XetupX (230K). Bug fix - autosave feature corrected.

Rubem Pechansky's HV Tahoma Bitmap Font - Freeware Rubem has created an 8 pt bitmap version of Microsoft Tahoma, pictured here. This font is good for it is most useful for simulating Windows interfaces. A readme.txt file is included to help you get the best results. Rubem has also included some bitmap examples.  Click here to download (32K).

SPX Spiral Generator

Dmitry Malutin has created a very simple and effective utility to help Xara X users generate spirals in two formats: Linear and Exponential. It is free to all Xara X users.

Click here for a tutorial and to go to the download page.

Son of XPal. Well that’s not altogether accurate. But Brian Etherington has come up with another splendid utility that you can use with Xara to allow all parts of an image to have names and named colours. It’s called XColor.

I could take up a few pages and fumble around trying to explain what XColor does. But that would be foolish when Egg Bramhill has already done it for you. Click here to see Egg’s tutorial, then Click here to download your own free copy of XColor. (Zipped file size is around 600K).