Teach Yourself
CorelDRAW 8 in 24 Hours
In the hours that you put into learning CorelDRAW, you learned to create some complex illustrations. How do you share those graphic images with the world? You can print them or you can display them onscreen, for example, in a web site. In this hour, you learn to print your CorelDRAW illustrations. You learn to move your CorelDRAW 8 objects into a web page in the next hour in this book.
Printing can be easy or complex. If you print your CorelDRAW illustrations with your own laser printer, the process is basically governed by Windows 95 (or Windows NT). This is true for both color and black-and-white printing. If you've looked at the displays at your local copy shop, you've seen some spectacular color printer output, including full-color posters with near- photographic quality.
CorelDRAW also comes with a full set of printer options that make it easy to print business cards, labels, and other odd-sized output. You learn to print cards and labels in this hour.
Where things get tricky is when you want to translate your CorelDRAW illustration into a mass-produced printed publication. That requires bringing something, a file or printed layout, to your printer. You learn to manage that process in this hour as well.
If you are preparing a limited number of copies of your illustrations, you can get excellent quality from a color printer. Home-quality color printers are extremely low-cost, and office-quality color printers are more accessible as well.
For the next step in quality, your local Kinko's, Copymat, or the equivalent has color printers with output quality that will create impressive posters and displays. If you need 100,000 copies of your illustration, this isn't a viable option. But if you need one or two copies, or even a hundred copies, the new technology in color printers is your best option.
In the previous hour, you learned how to deal with printing your CorelDRAW illustration on machines that don't support CorelDRAW. You can export your illustration to a program that is supported by the computer connected to a quality color printer. Or if CorelDRAW is on your laptop, take your laptop to your local printer and have them print from your computer.
If you print the final output for your illustration on your own printer, your print options are basically those available to all Windows applications. You can print selected objects, select pages when you have a multipage document, and print multiple copies. If you have multiple copies of a multipage document, you can click on the Collate check box.
Just A Minute: The Collate check box organizes your copies so that your documents print out in sets. For example, if you have a four-page document and you want to print two copies, collating prints pages 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then print pages 1, 2, 3, and 4 in that order again. If you do not select the Collate check box, your two copies print in the order of two copies of page 1, followed by two copies of page 2, two copies of page 3, and then two copies of page 4. Collating makes it easier to organize your work, but it slows down the printing process by up to 40%.
To access printer options, don't click on the Print button in the Standard toolbar; instead select File | Print from the menu bar. You see the General tab in the Print dialog box, shown in Figure 18.1
In the General tab of the Print dialog box, you can select an installed printer from the Name drop-down menu, and choose which pages to print in the Print Range area. If you print more than one copy of your file, you can click on the Collate check box in the Copies area to place your copies in order. If, for example, you print 20 uncollated copies of a four-page publication, you'll get 20 page ones, 20 page twos, and so on. If you collate your copies, you'll get 20 sets of the complete document.
The General tab of the Print dialog box has the basic controls for printing your illustration.
One interesting option is the Even or Odd selections available from the drop-down list in the Print Range area. You can use this to create two-sided copies with a single-side printer. Do this by first printing odd pages, then even pages. Double-sided printing is handy for creating small numbers of pamphlets or two-sided handouts. You can also use double-sided printing to create models of publication that a printer will publish.
There's an easier way to print duplex (double-sided) pages using printers that print on only one side of the page. The Layout tab of the Print dialog box has an option that walks you through the process of printing double-sided pages, and helps you avoid printing twice on one side of the page and not at all on the other. To access that option, select the Layout tab and pull down the Signature Layout drop-down list. Choose Double Sided Full Page. You can then click on the Print Preview button to see how your publication will look when it's printed back to back on pages. Figure 18.2 shows the Preview screen illustrating double-sided pages.
After you preview your double-sided document, you can click on the Close button in the Preview window toolbar to return to the Print dialog box. Then, after you click on the Print button in the Print dialog box, CorelDRAW patiently walks you through the process of double-sided printing. Be prepared to waste a few sheets of paper while CorelDRAW tests your printer and asks you some questions. You supply the answers to a wizard, which determines how your printer works. After that, you get explicit directions on how and when to load sheets of paper to achieve double-sided printing.
Even if your printer doesn't print duplex, you can print double-sided pages with CorelDRAW.
Business cards and labels are created a bit differently than they are in some other desktop publishing programs or word processors. Rather than duplicating a full sheet of cards or labels, you simply choose an appropriate Page Layout, and then create a single card or label.
CorelDRAW's Page Layout options dialog box supports hundreds of label and card layouts from several major publishers. Your local office supplies store has standardized size labels for everything from video cassettes to CDs. They also sell full-sheet business card paper that separates into individual business cards.
It's not necessary to purchase laser business card sheets to try this; you can experiment with a regular sheet of paper.
CorelDRAW comes with hundreds of preset card and label sizes.
Designing business cards or labels is as easy as creating any other CorelDRAW illustration.
If all you need is professional black-and-white printing, you can take your CorelDRAW file to a commercial printer and let them print it. Or export your CorelDRAW file to a file format your printer can work with. In Hour 17, you learned to export your CorelDRAW objects to other file formats, including the universally recognized EPS file format.
If you need to prepare your CorelDRAW pages for commercial color printing, you have many different qualities of output available to you. Commercial, large-quantity printing requires separate plates for different colors. Two ways that colors can be separated for color printing are spot color or process color. Spot color is typically used for two-color printing. For example, if you have a brochure you want to print in red and black, you can arrange with your printer to provide him with a black master and a red master page. Both the black and red masters will be converted to printing plates and printed over each other to produce two-color output.
Process color involves combining four color plates, usually Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (abbreviated as CMYK). With process color, you provide your printer with four different color masters used to create four color plates.
Reproducing complex or spectacular color-mix fountain fills is beyond the capability of spot color separations. You can use one-color fountain fills, such as from black to white, with spot coloring. But even with process color printing, fountain fills sometimes appear as bars of color. Fine-tuning very complex color mixes for process color printing is a complex art that requires a lot of experimenting and experience.
Just A Minute: Although transferring coloring from monitor to paper is very complex, your color images translate into web graphics much more easily, as you'll see in the next hour on web graphics.
Scenario: The next issue of your newsletter or brochure is going to be printed in color. In a quick call to your printer, you learn he will accept your 600dpi output to create printing plates with. Your printer also informs you that he can duplicate PANTONE colors.
Just A Minute: To see exactly what colors you'll get from your printed output, do not rely on what you see on your monitor. Instead, ask your printer for a sample book showing the way PANTONE colors will look when printed.
The first step in preparing your publication for two-color spot color printing is to make sure that all the fills and outlines in your publication are confined to two colors. If you've created a publication already, you can use the Object Manager (see Hour 16) to determine the fill and outline properties of all your objects. Pick the two PANTONE spot colors that you will assign to objects, and change the assigned colors of every object to those colors.
Just A Minute: Most printers define two-color spot printing as black, plus a second color. Some allow you to use any two colors, but most pass on some additional charge for washing out black plates. Check with your printer about the policy on charging for two-color printing.
One way to check your publication and see what colors are assigned to every object is to view the Object Manager Docker window. You explored the Object Manager in Hour 16. You can display the Object Manager Docker window by selecting Layout | Object Manager from the menu bar . In Figure 18.5, every object in my publication is either PANTONE Process Black CV or PANTONE Process Red 032 CV.
The Object Manager is a good way to check assigned colors to objects.
After you assign two (and only two) colors to all the objects in your publication, select File | Print from the menu bar. Normally, if you prepare master pages for a printer, you want to select all pages and one copy in the General tab of the Print dialog box.
Click on the Separations tab in the Print dialog box. In the Separations tab, click on the Print Separations check box. If you have restricted your publication to two colors, you see those two colors in the list at the bottom of the dialog box, as in Figure 18.6.
Most of the other check boxes in the tab are not relevant for spot-color separations. But the Print Empty Plates check box is useful. It prints two master sheets for each page, even if only one color is used on that page. This makes it easier to keep your pages organized.
The Separations tab lists all the colors assigned to your publication.
You can print an additional set of your separation masters that have information on them identifying which color goes with that plate. This is helpful in avoiding mixed up colors when plates are printed. You can add this information in the Prepress tab of the Print dialog box. Click on the Position Within Page check box to print color information on each page.
Before you print your two different spot-color separations for each page, you can click on the Preview button in the Print dialog box to see how the separations will come out. Figure 18.7 shows a single-color separation without the reference color information This is the sheet that your printer will use to create a printing plate.
Color separations can be previewed.
Printing process color separations is similar to creating spot color separation. The results are much less predictable in that all colors and fountain fills are broken down into four colors. CorelDRAW does this automatically for you.
To create four-color CMYK process color separations, select File | Print from the menu bar and click on the Separations tab in the Print dialog box.
If you applied only process colors to objects in your publication, you see four colors listed in the color list: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. If you mixed process colors and spot colors, no problem. Click on the Convert Spot Colors to CMYK check box, and the spot colors you assigned will be broken down to mixtures of the four CMYK colors.
When you separate your colors into the CMYK colors, you can follow the same steps you learned for printing spot color separations. The difference is, you get four sheets per page if you click on the Print Empty Plates check box.
For high-quality CMYK color separation, you need to rely on a very high-quality service bureau printer to create your copy-ready masters. You can, of course, print lower-quality copies on your own laser printer to get a basic idea of what your color plates will look like.
To bring your file to a service bureau, find out what printer output they use and how you can send your printer output in a compatible file. Many times, the printer can provide you with printer drivers for a compatible printer. You don't need the printer, only the software that creates files for that printer. If you already have a postscript printer installed, you can often select that printer.
To create a file for a service bureau, select a compatible printer in the General tab of the Print dialog box. In Figure 18.8, I've selected an Imagesetter printer. I don't have an Imagesetter because I can't afford one! But my service bureau has one. By selecting the Print to File and For Mac check boxes (because my service bureau uses a Macintosh), I can create a file that I can take to my service bureau.
When you click on the Print button in the Print dialog box after selecting the Print to File check box, you'll be prompted to choose a folder and filename for your print file. Take that file to your service bureau. It can use the file to create high-quality output that your printer can use to shoot printing plates for the production process.
Print output can be sent to a file and taken to a service bureau for high-quality copy-ready output.
Printing with CorelDRAW can be as simple or complex as your needs. If all you need is output on your laser printer, CorelDRAW provides you with complete control over pages, and can create back-to-back duplex output.
If you need to take your CorelDRAW file to a commercial printer for color printing, your two options are spot colors or process colors. Spot colors are typically used for two-color printing. Process colors mix four colors to create a full array of colors. You can create color separations in CorelDRAW, and print them, or create a file with print output to take to a commercial service bureau for high-quality copy-ready output.
In this workshop, you first print mail labels. Then, you create a two-color publication and print color separations.
Label and card layouts in the Options dialog box.
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