Xara Xtreme LX 0.5, with the famous microscope demo image |
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| Developer(s) | Xara Group Ltd. |
| Preview release | 0.6 / July 15, 2006 |
| Operating system | Linux, Mac OS X |
| Type | Vector graphics editor |
| License | GNU GPL |
| Website | xaraxtreme.org |
Xara Xtreme LX, also frequently called Xara LX for short, is an open source version of the commercial 2D vector graphics editor, Xara Xtreme. The abbreviation LX stands for Xara Xtreme on Linux.
The first version was released for Linux in October 2005, and Xara Ltd announced it will release the source code of the trimmed down version under the GPL and seek community help in porting it over to Linux and Mac OS X using the wxWidgets toolkit.
At the opening of the Libre Graphics Meeting 2006 [1] in Lyon, France, Xara has released most of the source code of Xara LX in an updated website with details on how to access the sources. According to Xara LX homepage, the released source code contains "the majority of the Xara Xtreme source code". Currently, the only part of Xara LX that isn't under GPL is the CDraw rendering engine, though reportedly Xara is working on preparing that code for publication as well.
Xara has also granted write access to their subversion repository for some external developers. The website also carries stable and nightly Linux builds.
The 0.3 beta series for the first time allows use of the new *.xar file format for the open source version. Previous versions only supported opening and playing with bundled demo files. Version 0.5 was the first to also have functional save feature.