New Xara Product: Xara Xtreme PRO
I’ve been searching around today (in vain so far) for an open-source, command-line tool that allows for the conversion of an SVG-formatted file to PDF—I know of ImageMagick which would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that it rasterises the damn SVG before converting to a PDF (which defeats the purpose of creating a PDF at all in my opinion).
In my travels, however, I stumbled across Xara Corporation’s press release page (looking at something to do with Über-Converter, which would probably do the trick if I were willing to spend 12 hours getting all the Perl dependencies installed required to get the damn thing running), when I stumbled across the latest entry which was amazingly dated today (how lucky is that?):
28 Nov 2006–Xara releases Xtreme Pro
Xara is pleased to announce the release of the most powerful member of the Xara X family - Xara Xtreme Pro.
(Note: I don’t link directly to the article as Xara’s site stupidly uses some kind of JavaScript to call up the appropriate document. The webmaster at Xara should really fix that).
A quick skim of the features suggests that this is a pretty cool functional upgrade to Xara Xtreme: Basic (non-scripted) animated Flash output support, more pre-press work (including, finally, the ability to have a document span multiple pages), better PDF control, improved text control, and Photoshop document import/export (with layers intact, presumably). In other words, stuff that would be useful for the design professional but probably not of much interest to the artist or casual user.
The price to upgrade from Xara Xtreme is $100 USD, $200 USD if you’re not upgrading (although they have a promotion running currently where that price is reduced by $20).