CorelDRAW 12 Breaks the Unicode Barrier

© 2005 by David Troidl, All Rights Reserved.

1. Introduction

Back in the day—2002 actually—when my Atari ST died and I launched out into “high end” computing, we found we just couldn’t get by on my dollar store graphics program. I still have it on my system—and it gave me 50 fonts—but we scrimped and saved, got our $80 together and went to Office Depot to buy CorelDRAW Essentials. I devoured the manual, then went to the library and got CorelDRAW 9: The Official Guide. The book was so good, I had to get it. $1.87 at Amazon.com. And of course I went to Graphics Unleashed, where all the tutorials were free. Does this somehow make you think of "starving artists"? Well, this tutorial is my way of saying thank you. Enjoy!

2. The Wonderful World of Unicode

Pan forward. I’m a community college Math professor, so I use a lot of equations and Math symbols, but what really got me to the point of converting to Unicode was Biblical studies. Trying to type ancient Greek and Hebrew words with just SP Ionic and SP Tiberian got to be very frustrating. Along comes Unicode. Instead of having to jimmy around the same 256 ASCII codes to cover all the languages of the world, we expand our horizons a little. Couldn’t we use two bytes to encode a character? This led to the XML standard UTF-8 encoding. As long as your byte starts with a zero, use it to get the normal Basic Latin character. But if it starts with a one, read the next byte. This approach gets us an additional 32,000 characters. Later, it was expanded still further, but lets just concentrate on the basics for now.

Setting up your system for Unicode and then using it in CorelDRAW 12 will require several steps. First, we have to tell Windows that we want to use other languages. I’ll be focusing on Windows XP, because it has all the capabilities we need. Next, we need to have a way of identifying what language we want to type. Then, we have to have a method for actually inputting the characters. And finally, we have to learn how CorelDRAW 12 handles Unicode, to get the text onto our page.

3. Regional and Language Options

Now we actually get to do something. Open up Control Panel | Date, Time, Language and Regional Options | Regional and Language Options and click the Languages tab. See image at right.

Make sure the Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai) box is checked. The complex script and right-to-left languages include Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, the Indic languages, Thai, and Vietnamese. This will come into play later.

Now click the Details button. This will open up the Text Services and Input Languages dialog. (at right) Now in the Installed Services area, use the Add button to add a language and associate a keyboard layout with it. The Add Input language dialog appears. For this example choose Greek in the top dropdown list, and then Greek Polytonic from the second list (above), and click OK. Most other languages can be added the same way.

Still in the Text Services and Input Languages dialog, under Preferences, click the Language Bar… button. We get the Language Bar Settings dialog. (see below)

Make sure Show the Language bar on the desktop and Show additional Language bar icons in the taskbar are checked. Now click OK, OK and OK. We’re finished setting up Polytonic Greek on the computer.

4. Using Your New Language

I usually keep the Language bar minimized in the taskbar, but it can be displayed and moved anywhere on the screen. You should notice a square with the letters EN, for English. If you click the square, you’ll see a pop-up listing your installed languages. It should have EL for Greek (in Greek).

Now before we can start typing Greek, we have to have a font selected that supports Polytonic Greek. You can use Palatino Linotype if you choose, but for my examples I’m going to be using GentiumAlt. You can download it free for noncommercial use from: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium

Example 1:

1. With your Greek font selected, type “Greek in Greek: “ (in English).
2. Now on the Language bar, click the EN button, and from the pop-up menu, choose EL Greek.
3. Now to type the Greek word, start with Shift-Quote. This is a deadkey, meaning nothing is displayed on your screen until you type a capital E. Then you should get the first two symbols.
4. Continue on with: l, l, h, n, i, k. Then we need another deadkey to get the accent on the o. Type a semicolon ; followed by o. And the final character is a special form of sigma, so type w.

This is a simple example for inputting another language. Even if you’re not particularly interested in ancient Greek, the same ideas apply to installing and using most any language that requires special accents on the letters. Below is a chart for the Greek Polytonic keyboard layout.

If you decide to install any other keyboard that doesn’t come with a layout chart, you could benefit from a few comments about this one.

1. If you go to View | Grid and Ruler Setup, you can set the grid frequency to 6.0. With Snap To Grid activated, you can easily make each button two-thirds of an inch high. Then the keyboard fits perfectly on the page.
2. You can generally use your keyboard to type the characters on each key. When you come to a deadkey, with most keyboard layouts you could type Space to see the diacritic. Though with the Greek Polytonic keyboard, the spacebar is used for additional characters, so I had to type an appropriate vowel with the diacritic, then convert it to curves, break it apart and delete the vowel.
3. Many keyboards use the AltGr or CapsLock to add additional characters. Here each key displays the Normal, Shift, AltGr and Shift-AltGr states in the four corners. This is the easiest layout chart for me to use.

Example 2:

Any effects you can apply to regular text work just as well for Unicode text. Type the text at 72 points. Start with Quote as a deadkey before a capital A, then b, b, followed by [, a. Then apply fountain fill, contour and drop shadow. The details are for another tutorial. is an Aramaic term corresponding to the English “papa”.

5. Complex Text Layout

For Right-to-Left languages and other special situations, we need to use Complex Text Layout. Our examples here will be using Hebrew. For best results, I encourage you to download the SBL Hebrew Font from: http://www.sbl-site.org/Resources/default.aspx. This is the only Hebrew font I’ve found that displays properly in CorelDRAW 12. The package includes the font, four manuals and two keyboard layouts. The BHebSIL is the one I use. It has a good phonetic correspondence between the Hebrew letters and the English keyboard. The BHebTiro keyboard matches the modern Israeli keyboard. Either one will install in the Windows keyboard list for Hebrew. Follow the directions in the corresponding Keyboard Manual. You can also print the Keyboard Charts if you intend to keep using the layout. One thing to note here: if you right-click the Language bar and choose Settings from the pop-up menu, you get immediate access to the Text Services and Input Languages dialog.

Example 3:

1. Before we can start typing, we have to set up our formatting. With nothing selected, open Text | Format Text… On the Character tab, click the Script: dropdown and choose Middle Eastern. Then the Font: dropdown will display only those fonts that support Middle Eastern languages. Choose SBL Hebrew, or any Hebrew font on your system. This will set the default Middle Eastern font.
2. Now with the Text Tool, click in an open space and start typing "Hebrew in Hebrew: ". It will appear in your default Latin font.
3. Now click the EN in the Language bar and select HE Hebrew—assuming you installed the Hebrew language and keyboard.
4. Type Shift-< (comma), i, b. The vowel under the b is Sheva, type ; (semicolon), then r, i, y. Notice as you’re typing, the letters follow each other right-to-left. The Hebrew is in the default Middle Eastern font you set in Step 1.

This is a really quick introduction to Unicode. Learning either of these languages and their keyboard layouts takes time and practice.

Example 4:

1. If you just want a few characters, especially consonants in Hebrew, the Insert Character docker may be the way to go. Most any font on your system that covers the Hebrew block should be accessible here. located under Text > Insert Character.
2. To use the docker effectively, you may want to grab its title bar and drag it into the work area. The Code Page: dropdown is very wide and hard to navigate when docked.
3. Choose 1255 (ANSI - Hebrew) in the Code Page: dropdown. Then the Font: dropdown will highlight only those fonts that support Hebrew. Choose a font, scroll down and pick your letters. The Insert button will insert the character at the text cursor.
4. If you want to return to regular English characters, you have to scroll up the Code Page: dropdown and select 1252 (ANSI - Latin-1).

In the illustration you can see Ayin Mem from the David font. Then the graphic I made for a Hebrew Dictionary icon and the resulting icon bitmap, as it will display on the desktop. One thing to note here is that my icon application is not Unicode aware. So to copy and paste the graphic to the icon program, I had to convert the text to curves.

You may have noticed a few times in this tutorial I used characters like the ellipsis ... and the em-dash —. You can get these from the Insert Character docker, under Latin-1. You’ll also find the cent sign ¢ and a few Math symbols: 4² ÷ 2 = 4 × 2.

There’s also a selection under Code Page: for All Characters. Here the list can be quite long, but you can find any character the font covers. They are identified by their Unicode number. The only problem is that CorelDRAW 12 uses base 10, while most other Unicode utilities use hexadecimal. So when the less-than-or-equal sign is listed as 08804, this would be 2264 in the Windows Character Map, for example. Though you can use Character Map directly to copy and paste characters at the text cursor.

This should get you started on a life of happy Unicoding. I’ll finish up with a few references, if you want to go further.

6. References

1. Fonts for Scholars: http://scholarsfonts.net/index.html Additional information and the Cardo font.
2. Biblical Language Fonts and Unicode: http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/rd_rsrc.htm#Fonts More information and the Galilee Greek font.
3. Unicode and Multilingual Support: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ Everything Unicode: fonts, applications, utilities.
4. SIL International: http://www.sil.org/ Look under: What we provide | Fonts and Writing Systems | SIL Fonts. Includes keyboard layouts.
5. BabelStone: http://www.babelstone.co.uk/index.html BabelPad text editor and character map utility.
6. OpenOffice.org: http://www.openoffice.org/ An open source office suite that does a good job with Unicode (a few minor glitches with Hebrew).
7. AbiWord: http://www.abisource.com/ An open source word processor. Smaller and better Hebrew than OOo, but more cumbersome to use.
8. Paint.NET: http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/ A great replacement for the Windows Paint program. Good Unicode handling.

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