CorelDRAW Artistic Challenges

I'd started a series of newsgroup posts where the goal was for others to emulate my artwork or create something similar in topic.

Any CorelDRAW.com member can start a new challenge of their own. In any case, I like the feeling of inspiring others to try things, or even be challenged myself.

Some of my examples to get things going:

Newspaper in CorelDRAW

I suspect it often surprises other CorelDRAW users (and Corel themselves) to see how the product is used in the real world.

Can CorelDRAW be used to design all components for a newspaper? We all know it can. Can it be used for layout also? Some shudder to think this, since CorelDRAW wasn't intended for it. But, I've learned that CorelDRAW is used in many ways that no one expects, until you see the production results in your hands.

I hope that some simple features are added to CorelDRAW to make it even easier to do layout such as this, such as auto page numbering, headers & footers etc. Not ground-breaking by any means, just basic functions.

CorelDRAW is such a pleasant working environment, that users will put up with various inconveniences and missing functions just to stay there. It truly is a Swiss army knife of graphics. Combined with PHOTO-PAINT, and the knowledge of how to use both, you have some extremely powerful tools at your disposal.

Watch the attached video. Keep something very important in mind: I know that over a million dollars in revenue was earned by someone using CorelDRAW in this exact capacity. If you, or a skeptical Adobe fan thinks CorelDRAW is a just a toy, or after 20 years of development that's it's still not ready for prime-time? Perhaps several dump-truck loads of physically produced items piled high in your back yard would change your mind.

Signs, t-shirts, promotional items, print projects, things cut out of steel, art engraved into solid granite...and yes, even newspapers. CorelDRAW is the nucleus of it all.

draw-paper.zip

Rarely used selection tip

Brian, a frequent visitor to the CNEWS groups, wrote:

I can't remember ever seeing it mentioned in these newsgroups, but at www.coreldraw.com one of the Corel employees gave a very useful tip to those who work with "treat all objects as filled" turned on.

Say you have a matrix of squares on the page (6 x 6 squares).

You wish to marquee select the center 4 x 4 squares. You can quickly do so as follows:

1. outside of all squares, start to drag out a marquee (selecting nothing at this stage)
2. while still holding the left mouse button, press the right mouse button at the same time
3. drag the marquee where you want it, say just top-left of the left uppermost square you wish to select
4. let go of the right mouse button while still holding the left mouse button and continue to drag your marquee as desired
5. release the left mouse button

Done!

Effectively, you are starting to draw your marquee, dragging it to where you need it, then finishing drawing your marquee. In the above example you could drag a marquee around the top left 4x4 squares of the matrix (giving you the correct sized marquee to begin with) and then press the right mouse button (still holding the left mouse button down) to slide the marquee over the centre 4x4 squares and then release the right mouse button before releasing the left mouse button.

I hope this helps someone; it has been useful to me at times.

Best regards, Brian

To show what Brian means, I made a video for you:

Output files to PNG's as halftones

Use Ghostscript Viewer/Ghostscript for this. See the PDF.

gsviewconvert.zip

To output to a printer instead, watch this video.

Technote: I tried LZW TIF's instead of PNG's for a while, but CorelDraw X4 wouldn't import them. Monochrome PNG's = no problems.