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Importing and Exporting 579

Importing and Exporting

General notes on exporting and importing

You may want to export Xara Designer Pro X documents to other applications, or export
them for use on a website. Or you may want to import designs from other sources. For
easy transfer, Designer Pro offers a wide range of import and export options.

Firstly, it is important to note the distinction between saving and exporting files:

• SAVING deals with storing your work so that you can open it and work on it at a later
date. Xara Designer Pro X saves your work in the .xar file format. Think of this as the
"master document" format.
• EXPORTING deals with converting designs to other supported formats. Exporting allows
you to use and distribute your designs. For example, you may want to create a PNG
file for a website, or a TIFF or PDF file for a printing company. Exported files are no
substitute for saved .xar files because they are not a complete representation of your
Xara Designer Pro X design, so always save your design as a .xar file too.

Recommended formats
The universal export formats, that can be read by the widest range of programs are the
bitmap formats, GIF, PNG and JPEG. These are also guaranteed to look exactly as you
see on screen in Xara Designer Pro X. PNG is the highest quality and can include
transparency support and is recommended for Microsoft Office applications.

PDF is the recommend export format for sharing files to be viewed or exported into
Adobe Illustrator. Xara Designer Pro X's PDF export is very high quality, is vector based,
and supports advanced features such as graduated transparency.

Export your document as HTML to export each page as a web page that can be
published and viewed using any popular web browser.

Other notes
With EPS and bitmap files you have a range of options on how to translate the data.
Some of these options can produce very large files (if, for example, your document has a
lot of graduated or radial fills or transparency).
File translation can take some time for a complex illustration.

Please note that other manufacturers can, and often do, change the specification of other
file formats. Information is given here in good faith but no guarantee is given that files
can be transferred between Designer Pro and any other package. Further, there are
often numerous different variations of a given file format, and Xara Designer Pro X
cannot support them all, especially if they are recent and non-documented formats.