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Square Corners Can Be Sticky -- Rounding Corners in CorelDRAW

© 2002 by Foster D. Coburn III. All Rights Reserved.

Recently I had a discussion with someone who creates vinyl graphics for all kinds of vehicles. He told me about a trick he used that made his vinyl much easier to work with than those of others. I'm going to share this trick with you and even show you a way to do it very quickly.

Round Off Those Corners

The key to the whole trick is to round off any square corners. I can already see a couple of you running to CorelDRAW to find the feature you've been looking for. Hold on, it isn't there. First, let me know you how to do this manually and then I'll see what we can do to make it go faster.

Figure 1 (at right) shows a capital A in Arial Black. I've put arrows next to each of the corners so you can easily see they are all squared off. Our goal is to round them just enough to make the vinyl easier to handle without having the roundness visible to the naked eye.

To learn the technique, we'll round off one of the corners. After you see how it is done, you can do the rest of the corners.

1. Convert the letter to curves by pressing the Ctrl-Q shortcut key. This will allow us to work with the individual nodes of the character.
2. Select the Shape tool (some of you may call it the Node Edit tool) from the toolbox and click on the node at the top left of the A.
3. Click just a hair to the right of the node with the Shape tool and you should get a round dot. When you see this dot, click the + icon at the far left of the Property Bar and a node will be added.
4. Go back to the original node and click just below it and again a round dot should appear. Again click the + icon on the Property Bar to add a node.
5. Highlight the original node and delete it. This should leave you with the two nodes you created.
6. Highlight both nodes and convert the segments to curves by clicking the Convert Line to Curve icon on the Property Bar.
7. While they are still highlighted, change both nodes to Smooth by clicking the Make Node Smooth icon on the Property Bar.

Figure 2 (at right) shows the results of these steps. Note that there are two nodes surrounding the rounded corner. We've zoomed in to 30,000% so that you can see things better.

So that you can see how subtle the change is to the corner, look at Figure 3. I've highlighted the rounded corner with the Red arrow. Can you see a difference? Probably only after you've looked a second time.

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There Must be a Quicker Way

You've now seen that it isn't terribly difficult to round the corners, but it can be very time consuming if you have a large number of objects in your drawing. Sure it can take time to work with vinyl if you don't use this trick, but I seriously doubt many people would take the time to round all corners. To find a better answer I went searching on the Internet and found a script that can do it for you automatically. To get your copy, go to http://www.oberonplace.com/vba/drawmacros/roundcornerssh.htm. Unfortunately this script will only work in CorelDRAW 10/11 and only on systems where VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is installed properly. Corel doesn't include VBA with the Academic version of CorelDRAW 10/11 and it doesn't seem to install properly for many other people. It does work fine for me and I've only heard of the problems from others.

Once you've installed the script as described on the Web site, it is time to run it. Make sure any objects are converted to curves and selected. Then select Tools | Visual Basic | Play. Figure 4 (below) shows the dialog box that will appear. I've already selected Corners (RoundCorners.gms) in the Macros in box and then RoundCorners.RoundCorners as the Macro name.

Clicking the Run button will bring up the dialog box in Figure 5 (at right) that allows us to choose the settings we want. I've chosen to have a corner radius of 1/100 of an inch or .01 inches.

After you click OK, it will take a few seconds to process all the new nodes and then you'll have round corners. Obviously, the more corners, the longer it will take to process. The end result is shown in Figure 6 (at right). Again, you'll have to look very carefully to see that the corners are no longer square.

In Closing

This exercise is pretty typical of many tasks in CorelDRAW. It wasn't difficult to round the corners, just a bit time consuming. And thanks to the wonderful scripting options, a script had already been developed to solve the problem. This script was certainly was too complex for the average user to create, but other tasks aren't nearly so difficult to automate. It all depends on what you are trying to do. For those of you who cut vinyl, you can make life much easier by rounding your corners. This trick may also be helpful to engravers as a rounded corner may be easier to navigate than one that is squared off.

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