Page 556 - Xara Designer Pro X17

556 Animations

If there is no rotate command, then the tween takes the shortest direct path between the
object on one keyframe to the next, rotating around its center. With a "rotate" command
on the object name, it calculates the actual rotation point, which in the above example is
the "large end" of the hand.

Note: It's not possible to rotate an object by a full 360° between keyframes if the rotation
point is not the center. For example, to do a full rotation of the clock hands in the above
example, you would need to create an intermediate keyframe.

What Xara Designer Pro X features does Flash support?

The Flash vector rendering is quite primitive compared to Xara Designer Pro X's, and so
you can't use many of the more advanced Xara Designer Pro X features such as
feathering, complex transparency and fill types, bevels, soft shadows, or contours. Lines
(strokes) are limited to be being simple constant thickness, round ended lines. No line
dashing is supported. The minimum line thickness is one pixel—so thinner lines in Xara
Designer Pro X will be displayed one pixel thick in Flash.
There are two aspects to producing Flash-compatible drawings. The first is to limit
yourself to use only those features supported directly by the Flash player. Secondly,
when producing animations, there is an even more limited set of characteristics that can
be tweened or animated.
Xara Designer Pro X drawing features that Flash supports:

• All normal line and shape drawings (although Flash is a lot less precise than Xara
Designer Pro X and so sometimes you may notice inaccuracies in lines and shapes).
• Flat, linear, circular and elliptical gradient color fills.
• Multi-stage gradient color fills, including linear and elliptical fills. Eight color stops
maximum.
• Flat transparency. Mix type only.
• Graduated transparency is supported for flat color filled objects (non-graduated). So
you can have graduated color objects with flat transparency or flat color objects with
graduated transparency, but not both.
• Constant width outlines (stroked paths) with rounded end caps and line joins (version
8 Flash files support the other join and cap types).
• Text, including kerning. You can use any fonts you like. The outlines of the characters
of any used fonts are embedded into the Flash file. This is much more efficient than,
say, font embedding in PDF documents.
• Text on a curve. Note: the line used for the curve must be made invisible for the
animation to work.
• Bitmaps and bitmap fills.
• Contoned (colored) bitmaps and bitmap fills.
• Photo Saturation, temperature color and blur (but not brightness / contrast change).
• Fractal Cloud and Plasma fills will work, but are converted to bitmaps, so not efficient.

So you can't use, amongst other things: