Xara Xtreme LX

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 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 is not 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.