The Windows platform suffers no shortage of graphics software, but Xara always offers something special that lifts its products clear of the seething mass of competition. The new Xara Xtreme Pro is another good example. It's one of the very few high-end drawing programs on the market that approaches PDF output with a level of precision that should turn the heads of production professionals.

Over the years, Xara's eponymous product line has often led the way in innovation. It was the first vector illustration package to offer live editing while in full preview mode, and the first to preview anti-aliasing. Best of all, there is no redraw delay when you work in Xara, even with complex, photo-realistic artwork. Such productivity features have won Xara a large and loyal fan base. Even Corel licensed Xara's core technology for a while.

The current release of Xara's flagship program is Xara Xtreme, which comes with just about everything a serious graphic designer would want from a vector drawing package: precision editing, layers, envelopes, transparency, Web graphics, bitmap effects, 3D extrusion, the lot. It even includes its own photo editing utility.

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Xara Xtreme Pro is not an upgrade to this package, however; at least not in the conventional sense. Rather, it is an alternative edition of the same package, featuring a number of additional functions to suit users in a professional print (and to some extent Web) production environment. It's akin to Adobe selling concurrent Standard and Professional editions of Acrobat, or Standard and Premium editions of Creative Suite.

The big news is that Xara Xtreme Pro comes with advanced tools for generating Adobe PDF files, including layer, transparency and security options. The program can export version 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 PDFs (version 1.6 was introduced by Adobe Acrobat 7), and provides validated presets for PDF/X-1a (2001 and 2003) and PDF/X-3 (2002 and 2003), which should make anyone working in prepress sit up and take notice. This means you can finally dispense with the ever-unreliable EPS format, instead exporting straight to high-end PDF formats for reliable direct output or for placing onto Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign pages.

You can now also import PDFs from other sources for editing as vector graphics, much as you can with Adobe Illustrator. Sure, it makes a bit of a dog's dinner of certain PDFs, especially when missing fonts are concerned, but then Adobe Illustrator can be just as hapless at times.

Anyone designing for print will also appreciate Xara Xtreme Pro's built-in Pantone colour libraries and support for process and spot separation output. You can both import and export bitmap images in native Photoshop PSD and TIFF formats, which should iron out the wrinkles in many graphics workflows. The Xara Photo Editor utility included with the Pro edition now sports a Levels (histogram) adjustment feature.

This Pro edition also comes with the ability to create animations, complete with tweening, and export them to Flash SWF format. There's no support for ActionScript, so you can't use Xara Xtreme Pro to produce complete interfaces, but it's fine for standard animations and click-through ad banners (URLs and clickTAGs are supported).

Significantly, this Pro edition at last lets you work with multiple pages per document. It even lets you set up double-page spreads, add margins and rulers, and run text across linked column boxes. It's no desktop publisher, though: you can't set up type style sheets or flow text around irregularly shaped objects. On the other hand, its multi-page support puts it ahead of Adobe Illustrator, which vehemently remains a single-canvas program. By contrast, you could design and lay out as many pages as you like within a Xara Xtreme Pro document and then export them directly to a multi-page PDF.

But would someone in a professional prepress environment seriously prefer Xara Xtreme Pro over Adobe Illustrator? Well, we are and yes, we do. And it's all about speed. For a lot of everyday jobs within a production workflow incorporating QuarkXPress, InDesign and Photoshop, we found that it's possible to launch Xara Xtreme Pro, edit a graphic, export to high-resolution PDF and quit in less time than it takes Adobe Illustrator merely to launch. When you're on deadline, this really matters.

The one aspect of Xara Xtreme Pro that doesn't impress is the archaic look to parts of the user interface. While the tool action and the context-sensitive options bar across the top are unfussy and intuitive (not to mention copied by Adobe, Corel and others), its Gallery dialogue windows are ugly, clumsy and confusing. Oh, how we hate the Galleries. Please, Xara, do something about them.

Not necessarily a must-have upgrade for all existing Xara users, Xara Xtreme Pro will interest production professionals who need industrial-strength PDF/X handling or graphic designers want to export Flash animations directly from the program. Its multi-page support may also interest legacy Macromedia FreeHand users who feel left adrift by Adobe.