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Xara Designer Pro X10 release notes

When Repeating Objects are shared across variants they are not ‘live shared’ (which means they are independent of the other variants). This is necessary for most repeating objects, such as headers and footers, because you’ll want different ones on the variants. But this means when you select Variants  Share across variants on a NavBar, you’ll be prompted that this will be turned into a simple copy. You will then need to edit the NavBar as you please on the new variant (say change its design, or orientation), and then ‘Repeat on all pages’ again to copy across all the pages of that variant.  Remember if you select the ‘Site navigation bar’ option in the  NavBar dialog (just double click the NavBar) then you can create a NavBar that automatically contains links to all your pages.

Mobile websites are better with menus, not NavBars

Because of the narrow width of mobile screens, it’s common to replace a NavBar or row of buttons with just a single navigation button that shows a pop-up menu. Designer Pro supports dynamic pop-up (or pop-down) menus, and if your website has an automatic ‘site navigation bar’ (where the buttons automatically reflect the pages), then there’s a hidden short-cut way to convert a NavBar design into a single button menu. Double click the NavBar to bring up the NavBar editor. Delete each button in the main list, so there’s only one remaining button (typically called Home). Make sure this has no link on it. Now un-check and then re-check the ‘Site Navigation Bar’ option. This will re-build a Menu on the single button, with an entry to each page of your website. You can of course edit the name of the button and the menu entries as required.  (The key here is that when you make a button that has no link into a ‘site navigation bar’, it will put a menu on it. If the button had a link, then it would replicate that button into a NavBar.) This method only applies to websites that have  the automatic ‘Site Navigation Bar’ option chosen.  If you have a customized NavBar, then you will need to build a menu manually, using this dialog. To customize the appearance of the menu, click the ‘Pop-up menu style’ button, bottom right.  Remember to preview your working menu it’s necessary to preview the web page.

Variants have the same pages

When you add or delete a page in one variant, it automatically creates or removes the page in the other variant. So your website always has the same page arrangement in all variants.

Multi-column behaviour

Most websites use columns of text, no text boxes or frames. Each text column or frame is treated as a separate shared item. So this means if you have text in two separate areas (either two separate or text boxes) then you can’t copy the text from one into the other, as that edit will just be shared back to the other variants. So in order to re-arrange your two columns into one column, just move them to be one above the other. If you have ‘Push’ attribute set (Right click Position on page...) then editing one will push the text down as you need.