Date: August 2021

We've just released an update for Designer Pro, Photo and Graphic Designer, Web Designer Premium and Web Designer, bringing it up to version 18.5

Release notes: 

http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/designer-pro-x18/

http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/web-designer-18/

http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/photo-graphic-designer-18/

All updates are free if your update service is active. Xara should ask you to update on startup, if not you can manually check by going to Help > Check for Updates.

New Features

Advanced Color Profile Support

You can now select a color profile to use for onscreen CMYK conversion, or upload your own ICC color profile.

Color profiles controls the way that CMYK colors appear on your monitor, giving you a close representation of how it will look when printed.

For more information, please see the Color Profiles article here.

(Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer only)

Open Graph Support

Open Graph allows your published website or web document to provide a preview in any social network or app that can show it, whenever it is referenced. For example if you paste www.xara.com into a Social Media app, the app will almost immediately show the graphic below, which is published as part of the website.

The Utilities > Web Properties dialog has a new Open Graph tab. Click on the Help button within the program for more information

(Designer Pro X and Web Designer Premium only)

WebP Import and Export

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. You can read more information about the format here.

WebP will improve not only the loading times and performance of your website, but will also boost your SEO score!

Please see this article on how to enable WebP within your website.

(Designer Pro and Web Designer Premium only)

Google Fonts Library Update

21 new fonts added:

"Antonio", "Bona Nova", "Dela Gothic One", "Encode Sans SC", "Festive", "Fuggles", "Karantina", "Kiwi Maru", "Lexend", "New Tegomin", "Orelega One", "Otomanopee One", "Qahiri", "STIX Two Math", "Tourney", "Train One", "Uchen", "Yomogi", "Zen Dots", "Zen Loop", "Zen Tokyo Zoo".

Other Improvements and Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused list items have wrong font size after outdent of the line above.
• Fixed an issue that caused the button pallete to fail to render the controls.
• Fixed an issue that caused text to appear pixelated when inactivate in dialogs.
• Reliability improvements when importing AI files.
• Reliability improvements when publishing websites to Xara hosting.
• Fixed an issue that caused videos to be misplaced when placed on a pop-up layer.
• Fixed an error when clicking on replace with symbol from list properties dialog.
• Improvements to Word import and export