One way to get your Website's logos and page titles to literally stand out is by making them 3D. Xara3D is designed to make the whole process a cinch.

You start by clicking the Text icon in the toolbar and entering your text. You can use any font installed on your system, but some work better than others, and Xara3D provides 50 of its own.

Once you click OK, your text appears in all its antialiased 3D glory, complete with default shadow, extrusion, fill, bevel and lighting. You can drag shadow and lights onto your text to reposition them in 3D space, and the overall effect updates in realtime.

Then it's time to refine your text by calling up the relevant palettes, such as the Extrusion palette, which lets you change the depth of your effect, while the Bevel palette allows you to choose between 25 corner effects, including four new options: Fancy Incut 1 and 2, Bumpy and Ridged. You're able to format your text using uniform fills with the Colour palette, or apply any of a wide range of preset patterns using the Texture palette.
It doesn't take long to create an attractive effect from scratch using the palettes, but the easiest way to do it is by using the new Import Styles command. This opens a Style Picker dialog, which lets you copy some or all of the preset sample files' attributes.

Xara3D doesn't only create static 3D effects. Using the Animations palette, it's possible to quickly choose between one of 11 customisable animated effects. You can also now apply many animations to individual characters text and lights separately.

When you're happy with your project, export it. As before, you may export to the major bitmap-based standards – GIF, JPEG and AVI – and the dialogs for static bitmap formats now offer an image preview and feedback on file size. You can also now export to the Windows SCR screensaver format and Flash SWF format.

However, the Flash support is nothing like that from a dedicated program, and shadows and textures are immediately dropped unless you choose to output each SWF frame as a bitmap.
Ultimately, Xara3D 5 isn't about high-end power; it's about creating high-impact 3D text effects as quickly and easily as possible, and it does this job very well.