Teach Yourself
CorelDRAW 8 in 24 Hours
There's no need for me to tell you how strategic web sites have become. Both sites on the World Wide Web and sites on internal intranets are becoming an important way to share information, and that includes graphics.
In Hour 18, you saw that when you transfer your CorelDRAW illustrations to printed output, it is often difficult to re-create the coloring of your onscreen illustration on the printed page. One of the fun things about transferring your CorelDRAW images to web sites is that viewers see your fountain fills and colors in full living color.
You can place your CorelDRAW illustrations on web sites in two ways: save individual objects as web-compatible graphic images and then import them into a web page you are designing with another web publishing program; create the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code yourself. That works fine if you already know how to create web pages.
If you don't know HTML from WWW, you can still create full-fledged web pages with text, graphic images, backgrounds, and links to other sites in CorelDRAW. I've written many books about web-design packages and I found the process of generating web pages in CorelDRAW 8 pretty smooth and easy to use. In a half hour, I created the web page you see in Figure 19.1.
You can easily publish a CorelDRAW 8 page as a web page.
This short hour can only scratch the surface of web-compatible graphics, but that's okay. You don't need to know a lot of graphic file format theory to transform your CorelDRAW images into graphics for the World Wide Web. Here's the 30-second crash course.
Most web browsers--the programs that folks use to visit web sites--can interpret only images saved in the GIF or JPEG file formats.
Now that you've been introduced to the two universally recognized web-graphic formats, you can convert your CorelDRAW objects to either one of them.
Any object (or group of objects) in CorelDRAW can be saved to the GIF file format. Those GIF images can be placed in a web page.
The Selected Only check box is necessary to save only a selected object as a web image.
Just A Minute: All graphic images destined for the web are saved at 72dpi. There's no point in saving the images to a higher resolution because that is the resolution of most monitors. Saving at a resolution other than 72dpi distorts the size of your image when you place it in a web site.
CorelDRAW 8's Gif Export dialog box enables you to add interlacing and transparency to your web graphic.
Saving an image to JPEG file format is less common than saving images to GIF format. But if you have a scanned photo, JPEG images will probably reproduce the colors better on a web site.
To export an image to JPEG format, start by selecting the object(s) and clicking on the Export button in the toolbar. Click on the Selected Only check box in the dialog box.
Choose JPEG Bitmaps (JPG) from the drop-down menu and enter a name for the file in the File name box. Click on the Export button.
Because you do not have to (or get to) define a background color for JPEG graphics, you can just click on OK in the Bitmap export dialog box to let CorelDRAW make intelligent decisions about how to format your JPEG file.
Just A Minute: If you want to experiment with the two sliders in the JPEG Export dialog box, you can. Increasing the value setting for the Compression slider makes the file smaller but of poorer quality. It will load faster but look worse. Increasing the Smoothing slider value rounds off rough edges produced when you convert a vector-based image to a bitmap. The downside is that more smoothness also means blurrier images. To see the effect of your slider settings before you assign them, click on OK. The Progressive check box causes your JPEG file to "fade in" like GIF images do, but this feature is not recognized by all browsers. The Standard (4:2:2) setting in the drop-down list in the Encoding Method area is more memory efficient than the other (Optional 4:4:4) setting and the quality difference is usually unnoticeable.
This quick hour gives you enough skills to transfer your graphics to web sites. For expert level web graphic design, check out the many web graphics books entirely devoted to creating graphics for web sites.
CorelDRAW 8 comes with all the tools you need to create a web page that can be posted at a web site. You can design a page layout with a tiled background image. You can automatically transform all the objects on your page to web-compatible text and images. And you can even define links from your web page to other web sites.
In this section of the hour, I'll share a few tips to get you through this process without crashing into some of the pitfalls that can make this a bit frustrating. In no time, you'll have a web page designed. Do you have a web browser installed on your computer? If so, get ready to see your own web page in 40 minutes.
The best page layout to use for designing web pages in CorelDRAW 8 is a regular size page (8 1/2 by 11"), layed out in Landscape orientation. You can select Layout | Page Setup from the menu bar, choose Letter for paper size, and click on the Landscape radio button. Click on OK, and your page is ready to become a web page.
I won't attempt a crash course in the aesthetics of web page design except to give you one piece of advice: keep it simple. That doesn't mean you can't have a sophisticated CorelDRAW illustration on the page. It just means keep your web page to as few objects as possible. The page I shared in Figure 19.1 won't win design awards for flashiness, but it will open quickly and the information is easy to find. Most web pages have a title, a basic explanation of the page, and buttons composed of text and shapes that let visitors navigate to other web pages. Don't worry for now about defining those links, but you will probably want to put some on your page.
Web page backgrounds are created by taking a small graphic image and "tiling" it; that is, placing it side to side and top to bottom to fill the whole page. Why take a small image and tile it, instead of creating a background image large enough to fill the whole page? Mainly to keep the file size down and help the page load faster.
CorelDRAW handles this for you. You can save any object as a GIF image, and then use it as a tiled-page background.
You can define your own, custom web page background tiles in CorelDRAW.
Once you export an object as a GIF bitmap file, you can use it as a page background for your web page.
Any tiny filled rectangle can be a web page background.
You can make text web-compatible two ways. You can convert artistic text to curved objects or assign attributes to paragraph text that make it display well on web sites.
CorelDRAW 8 comes with an automatic feature that ensures that your paragraph text will be interpreted more or less as you format it when it's viewed in a web browser. You can still edit paragraph text after you make it web compatible.
The HTML Text Property bar comes with preset font sizes that are interpreted by all web browsers.
You can edit HTML (web site) compatible text the same way you edited regular paragraph text. But when you assign format features, choose attributes from the HTML Text Property bar.
Links to other web sites are most easily defined using the Internet Objects toolbar. To view this toolbar, choose View | Toolbars from the menu bar, and then click on the check box next to Internet Objects in the Options window. Click on OK to see this toolbar in your Drawing window.
The Internet Objects toolbar can be moved or docked. You can refresh your docking skills by checking back to Hour 4 in this book.
Links to other web sites can be assigned to any object.
The web page you have defined needs to be converted to an HTML file before it can be published on a web site. To do that, select File | Publish to Internet from the menu bar.
The first Publish to Internet Wizard dialog box gives you three choices for HTML style types. The first radio button, HTML, is much more reliable. Click on it and click on the Next > button.
In the second wizard box, leave the HTML tables radio button checked for the most reliable conversion to HTML. If you need to save your HTML page in a folder other than the selected one, use the Browse button to locate that folder. Then click on the Next > button.
The third wizard box asks what kind of graphic image files you want to use. Click on the GIF radio button and the Interlaced check box to convert your images to GIF files that will "fade in" when visitors go to your web page. If, as in the exercises you did earlier in this hour, you already made your text web compatible, you don't have to check the Render All Text as Images check box. Click on the Next> button one last time.
In the final wizard box, enter a filename for your web page by clicking in the File Name column and typing a filename. In Figure 19.9, I'm saving my page as Dave.htm. Most browsers require the *.htm filename extension.
Saving your file as an HTML file will not place your page on the World Wide Web or on an intranet site. Transferring HTML files to web servers, computers that are accessible to web browsers, is beyond the scope of this book. Many Internet service providers, such as AOL, give you access to free web page space, and you can find out from them how to transfer your HTML-compatible files to their server. You can assign any name to your web page, but you should check the rules of the server to which you will publish your web site to find out what filenames are acceptable.
Just A Minute: If you plan to create and manage a web site that includes web pages, input forms, and sophisticated page design, you might want to check out the wide assortment of good books on web page publishing. I happen to have one out called Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 98 in a Week (Sams.net, 1997, ISBN # 157521-350-8). That book covers the entire process of bringing together pages, input forms, other web page components (such as sound and video), and working with web servers to make your site available on the World Wide Web or your intranet.
Whatever route you take to publish your web pages, you'll find that the graphics and pages you create in CorelDRAW 8 will mesh smoothly as you put together a site for the web.
You can assign any name to your web page.
After you name your web page, click on the Finish button in the final wizard page. After you do, CorelDRAW 8 checks your page for any problems that will prevent it from being published. You can elect to see those errors in the HTML Conflict Analyzer Docker window. The most common conflicts are:
After you fix your HTML errors, if any, run the wizard again to save your illustration as an HTML page.
Even if you haven't made arrangements to publish your HTML page to a server, you can still use the File | Open option in any web browsing software to open your file. You might get a warning message from CorelDRAW stating that it is unable to find your URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or web site address). Just click on OK and don't worry about that warning if you haven't transferred your page to the World Wide Web. This just means that your site isn't online yet.
In Figure 19.10, I'm viewing the web page I created in CorelDRAW 8 using Internet Explorer. IE recognizes the link to another web site and displays the target of the link in the IE status bar.
Web browsers will interpret the links you assign to objects in CorelDRAW 8.
This is the last hour in this book concerned with CorelDRAW. The next hours introduce you to PHOTO-PAINT and 3-D Dream. At this point, you've been introduced to enough of CorelDRAW 8 to have a lot of fun and create some impressive illustrations. You've also seen that CorelDRAW 8 is an extremely powerful software package, and a full investigation of its features is beyond what can be covered in 24 quick hours.
You have several resources to help you move up to the expert class of CorelDRAW illustrators. Corel's site for DRAW 8 was at http://www.corel.com/products/graphicsandpublishing/draw8/main.htm at this writing. If it gets moved, you can find it by going to Corel's home page at www.corel.com and following links for DRAW 8.
You'll also find several other CorelDRAW associated sites on the web where you can get advice and inspiration. The best of these is Rick Altman's CorelDRAW site at http://www.altman.com. Rick conducts entertaining, irreverent, high-energy seminars around the world, and his web site is at the center of the CorelDRAW design community.
Finally, let me close this section of the book by inviting you to share your CorelDRAW illustrations. When you create something you have to show off, email it to me at dkarlins@aol.com. Stay in touch with me via my website: http://www.ppinet.com.
You can convert CorelDRAW illustrations to web pages two ways: You can export individual objects as GIF or JPEG files, or you can use CorelDRAW 8's Internet Publishing Wizard to convert an entire drawing to a web page.
When you convert an illustration to a web page, text, graphics, and page background are converted to web-compatible file formats.
In this workshop, you publish a web page as an HTML file that can be placed on a web server and visited by web browsers.
Just A Minute: The image you use to create a background fill will be saved and then deleted from your web page. Use the saved file version of the image as a page background.
If you have a web browser installed on your computer, open the *.htm file you just created and test it in the browser.
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