Teach Yourself
CorelDRAW 8 in 24 Hours
In Hour 1 of this book, you jumped right into CorelDRAW 8. You didn't need a detailed investigation into the program environment to create a wide array of text and shapes and combine them to make a fairly complex illustration.
As you continue to work with CorelDRAW, you'll find that the features that make CorelDRAW so powerful require you to customize and define the working environment. For example, if you create designs with dozens of objects, you might find working in Wireframe view faster and easier. If you create technical drawings, you'll want to use CorelDRAW's capability to attach dimensions to objects. If you design graphics for a web site, you might want to create a custom Drawing page the size of a typical monitor, defined in pixels, not inches. These are just a few examples of the wide-ranging changes you can make to CorelDRAW.
You can customize the basic look and feel of CorelDRAW 8 to serve your own specific design tasks. In this hour, you learn how to work with the Standard toolbar, place Docker windows, and work with the status bar and rollups.
CorelDRAW 8 comes with ten premade toolbars, but 99% of the time you will want to use the Standard toolbar. It has all the tools you need to cut, copy, and paste objects, and to control the basics of your environment, such as zoom level.
There will be times later in this book when you will view and move additional toolbars. In Hour 19, "From CorelDRAW to the World Wide Web" for example, you will use the Internet Objects toolbar. When that happens, I'll remind you how to view additional toolbars. But you can try it quickly right now just to familiarize yourself with the process of viewing and moving a toolbar.
Choosing toolbars.
Figure 4.2 shows the Text toolbar displayed on the screen.
In Figure 4.3, I docked the Text toolbar at the bottom of the screen by moving it directly over the status bar. I'm using the Font Size List drop-down menu to choose a font size for selected text.
The Text toolbar is floating and covers part of the Drawing window.
Using the docked Text toolbar.
Just A Minute: If you display the Text toolbar and select text on your screen, you might have noticed that many of the features on the Text toolbar are already displayed on the Property bar that displays automatically when you select a text object. And you might be asking yourself, "Isn't the Text toolbar a bit redundant." I think so. In general, you will find that Property bars provide easy access to the features you want to apply to a selected object, and that the default settings displaying the Standard toolbar, the Property bar, and the Status bar provide the cleanest environment in which to work.
You can display or hide and dock or float any toolbar. To pull a docked toolbar onto the Drawing area, click on a section of the toolbar in between tools (not on a tool), and drag the toolbar into the Drawing area. In Figure 4.4, I've dragged the Standard toolbar onto the Drawing area.
The Standard toolbar can float.
Many of the tools on the Standard toolbar are familiar to the user of any Windows program. Others are unique to CorelDRAW 8, and some activate features that will be explored later in this book. For your reference, the following table identifies the tools on the Standard toolbar.
| Tool | Tool Name | What It Does |
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New | Opens a new file. |
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Open | Activates the Open Drawing |
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dialog box so you can open an existing file. | |
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Save | Resaves an already saved file, or opens the Save Drawing dialog box. |
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Opens the Print dialog box. | |
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Copy | Copies selected objects into the Clipboard. |
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Paste | Pastes the contents of the Clipboard into the Drawing area. |
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Undo | The icon undoes your last action; the drop-down list lets you undo a series of actions. |
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Redo | The icon redoes the last undone action; the drop-down list lets you redo multiple undos. |
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Import | Opens the Import dialog box from which you can import non- CorelDRAW files. |
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Export | Opens the Export dialog box, enabling you to export objects or files to other file formats. |
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View Quality | The drop-down list lets you choose from different views, including Wireframe, Draft, and Normal. |
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Zoom levels | The drop-down list lets you zoom in or out on your drawing. |
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Application Launcher | Lets you start other Corel applications. |
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Scrapbook Docker window | Opens a window on the right of the screen with saved files. |
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Symbol Docker window | Opens a window on the right of the screen displaying font symbols. |
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Script Docker window | Opens a window on the right of the screen with wizards and automated scripts. |
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Enable Node Tracking | Turns on temporary node editing when the cursor is moved over a note--see Lesson 5. |
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Show Text Frames | Reveals paragraph text frames--see Lesson 8. |
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What's This? | Click then point at components of the screen to get quick explanations of what the component does. |
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Corel Tutor | Launches online tutorials. |
Docker windows provide another way to access features in CorelDRAW 8. In Hour 1, you used the Symbol Docker window to drag symbols from font lists onto the Drawing area. The Scrapbook, Script, and Present Docker windows are also useful. But before we examine them, let's explore how you can control Docker windows in general.
The Symbol Docker window you used in Hour 1 is great for pulling symbols onto your Drawing area. The problem is, it takes up about a third of your screen, reducing your work area. You can solve that problem by simply closing the Docker window. You do that by clicking on the small X in the upper-right corner of the window. In Figure 4.5, I am closing the Symbol Docker window.
Click on the X in the upper-right corner of the rollout to close the Symbol Docker window.
A less extreme solution is to shrink the Docker window by clicking on the two right arrows on the left side of the top of the Docker window.
When you shrink a Docker window, the window zips up into a vertical bar that you can reopen by clicking on the two left pointing arrows at the top of the compacted window. In Figure 4.6, I am expanding a Docker window.
Expanding a compacted Docker window.
The Script and Preset Docker window makes available a number of predefined wizards that create calendars and apply effects to selected objects. The Calendar Wizard is great for creating customized calendars, like the one I do every year with embarrassing pictures of family members. The Calendar Wizard takes a while to generate a 12-month calendar, but it does a lot of work for you.
A simpler script is the one that applies shadows to a selected object.
In Figure 4.7, I've selected a lion symbol, and I am about to double-click on the Shadow script.
Shadowing a lion.
In Figure 4.8, I used the location spin boxes to slightly increase the distance of the shadow from the selected lion.
Defining a drop shadow.
Drop shadow applied.
The CorelDRAW Scrapbook is a visual version of the Windows Explorer. It enables you to pull objects off your system drives and into an open drawing. It also enables you to drag objects off your drawing and into the Scrapbook.
In Figure 4.10, I am dragging the camera image off the Drawing page and into the Scrapbook so that I can find it and use it easily. If you drag an object off the Drawing page, it will save as part of your CorelDRAW file, but it will not be available for other CorelDRAW files. If you place an object in the Scrapbook, it will be available there to drag back into any open CorelDRAW file.
The drop-down list at the top of the Scrapbook Docker window enables you to navigate your system drives and folders to find files. The tabs on the right side of the window help you sift through objects.
You rename files in the Scrapbook by right-clicking on the icon and choosing Rename from the shortcut menu. In Figure 4.11, I'm renaming the camera symbol I dragged into the Scrapbook and assigning the filename Camera2.cdr to that image.
Objects stored in the Scrapbook are easy to find and place in CorelDRAW designs. You can also import files, but the graphical interface of the Scrapbook makes it a handy way to manage files.
Placing a graphic object in the Scrapbook.
Renaming a file in the Scrapbook.
The status bar located underneath the Drawing area tells you a couple important things about a selected object. No, one of them is not the object's "social status." The Status bar tells you the type of object you have selected and the type of fill. In Figure 4.12, the Status bar is advising me that the object I selected is a rectangle and that the fill color is yellow.
Selecting a yellow rectangle.
The status bar also identifies the location of the cursor in x and y coordinates. The x value (the first one) represents the distance from the left edge of the Drawing page. The y value (the second one) represents the distance your cursor is from the bottom of the Drawing page.
Finally the status bar tells you what layer you are working with. Complex CorelDRAW files can have more than one layer. Layers are explored in detail in Hour 16, "Managing Layers and Pages."
As you explore more advanced formatting tools and effects, you will encounter CorelDRAW's rollups. These are miniwindows that hang out over your Drawing area that provide quick and easy access to groups of tools. You'll learn to use these tools in the rest of this book, but for now let's take a quick look at how rollups work.
You can open rollups in a variety of ways. You can select View | Rollups from the menu bar and choose from a list of rollups in that menu. Some tool flyouts also enable you to activate rollups. To open the Pen rollup, click and hold the mouse button on the Pen tool in the toolbox, as I am doing in Figure 4.13.
From the flyout, select the Pen rollup (the third tool on the flyout).
The Pen rollup that appears on your Drawing area holds all kinds of tools for defining outline size, style, color, and arrows. You explored these tools fully in Hour 3, but for now experiment with controlling the rollup itself.
Selecting the Pen rollup.
To roll up the rollup, click on the small, up-pointing triangle at the top of the rollup. The rolled up rollup doesn't take much space, but it is easily accessible if you want to use it. Want to get the rollup back on your screen? Just click on the small down arrow in the rolled up rollup to see the whole thing again.
If you click on (depress) the little thumbtack at the top of a rollup (see Figure 4.14), the rollup will stay on your work area after you apply an effect from it. If you deselect the thumbtack (so that it is not in the depressed position), the rollup will disappear after you apply an effect.
Sticking a rollup on the screen with a thumbtack.
Throughout the course of this book, you'll use many rollups. Now you know how to make them behave.
The CorelDRAW 8 environment can be somewhat overwhelming with at least three ways to apply many effects to objects: the menu bar, the toolbar, and the Property bar. And many features can be applied by rollups and toolbox tools as well. As you experiment with CorelDRAW, you will settle on ways you like to assign properties to objects. You'll find the Property bar is a useful jack-of-all-trades that enables you to define the properties you use most frequently to objects.
CorelDRAW can be any kind of environment you want it to be. You can define measurement units in anything from pixels to meters. You can select from dozens of predefined page sizes or define your own custom page sizes.
Properties you learned to apply to one object in Hour 1, such as size, fill color, and line color, can be applied to many selected objects or to grouped objects.
In this workshop, you will use your new environment-control skills to look at a drawing in different ways.
© Copyright, Macmillan Computer Publishing. All rights reserved.
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