Xara are pleased to announce the availability of version 0.7 stable.

This includes a range of further features, usability and reliability improvements. We now recommend that everyone upgrades to the new release.

Improvements since the 0.6 release:-

• Text tool improvements. Ruler support added to allow left, right and 1st line margins, and 4 types of tab stop (left, center, right and decimal), controlled by dragging on the page rulers. This area is now more powerful than the Windows version.

• Drag and drop file import. You can now drag files that can be opened (e.g. .xar, JPG, PNG etc) onto documents to import them

• Support added for more export and import formats using ImageMagick. These include TIFF, BMP, PICT, PPM, PDF (as bitmap), PSD and XPM. These are in addition to the existing built-in types JPEG, GIF and PNG. Other ImageMagick supported types can be added if there is demand.

• Brand new SVG import filter (work in progress). But be aware this is early days, and has limited support for graduated fill and transparency, and no support for text so far. Drag and drop should work for SVG files.

• Bitmap export dialog now includes a 2 preview windows. You can compare different export settings or different export types side by side prior to export.

• Product rename: Now that the product is increasingly close in functionality to the original Xara Xtreme, we're renaming the product Xara Xtreme for Linux or (Linux Edition). The executable filename remains as xaralx for now and xaralx is still referred to in many places, but we’d like all distribution package names and other naming of the tool to be Xara Xtreme rather than Xara LX.

• New popup slider for feather tool. Xara offered a bounty for this brand new control to be implemented into wxWidgets so that it could be used in Xtreme and in other applications that use wxWidgets. It’s not complete yet but when it is it will be used elsewhere in the program too.

• Printing improved. Designs are now fitted to the page and a bug in the postscript generation has been fixed.

• Gallery & Toolbar reliability improvements - galleries now remember their position.

• Working Adobe Illustrator import (to the same level as the Windows version, AI version 8 and earlier)

• Improvements to Autopackage installation including much faster install and file type registration (GNOME users can now launch Xtreme by double-clicking .xar files). We recommend using Autopackage as the quickest simplest way of installing and particularly of upgrading Xara Xtreme.

• Numerous other stability improvements and bug fixes.

If you want to see what Xara Xtreme for Linux can do, checkout our huge range of new screenshots.