IDENTITY
CARD GENERATING TECHNIQUE USING COREL DRAW
1.0 INTRODUCTION
CorelDRAW
is considered top, both for vector editing and prepress solutions. Its unique
capabilities exceed the typical vector designing software, places it deep in
the heart of the user who tried it and understands it. CorelDraw (styled CorelDRAW) is a
vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation of Ottawa,
Canada. It is also the name of Corel's Graphics Suite, which bundles CorelDraw
with a bitmap image editor, Corel PhotoPaint, and other graphics-related
programs (see below). The latest version is designated X6 (equivalent to
version 16), and was released in March 2012. In this article I will not discuss
the ease you can use VBA with, nor the multi-page capabilities that makes it an
excellent DTP software. We won’t even
talk about the pioneering concept of adding a mail-merge sub to a design
program, to allow you to auto-numbering forms all the way to change the details
of a company’s cards for each one of the employees with almost no effort,
almost a decade ago.
We
are going to talk about is the page and layout setup, as well as the very
sophisticated pagination system inside the printing environment. And we are
going to do that step by step, while working on a two sided business card with
a map.
2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW
In
1987, Corel hired software engineers Michel Bouillon and Pat Beirne to develop
a vector-based illustration program to bundle with their desktop publishing
systems. That program, CorelDraw, was initially released in 1989. CorelDraw 1.x
and 2.x runs under Windows 2.x and 3.0. CorelDraw 3.0 came into its own with
Microsoft's release of Windows 3.1. The inclusion of TrueType in Windows 3.1
transformed CorelDraw into a serious illustration program capable of using
system-installed outline fonts without requiring third-party software such as
Adobe Type Manager; paired with a photo editing program (PhotoPaint), a font
manager and several other pieces of software, it was also part of the first
all-in-one graphics suite.
2.1 FEATURES
Supported platforms
CorelDraw
was originally developed for Microsoft Windows 3 and currently runs on Windows
XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. The current version, X6, was released on 20
March 2012.
Versions
for Mac OS and Mac OS X were at one time available, but due to poor sales these
were discontinued. The last port for Linux was version 9 (released in 2000, it
did not run natively; instead, it used a modified version of Wine to run) and
the last version for OS X was version 11 (released in 2001). Also, up until
version 5, CorelDraw was developed for Windows 3.1x, CTOS and OS/2.
Problems
installing or running older versions of Corel Draw under Windows 7 may be
overcome by using Microsoft's "Troubleshoot Compatibility" —
right-click on the setup.exe file on the installation disk to select this
facility (tested on version 12 with Windows 7, where previous attempts without
Microsoft "Troubleshoot Compatibility" failed).
2.2 CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES
Several
innovations to vector-based illustration originated with CorelDraw: a node-edit
tool that operates differently on different objects, fit text-to-path,
stroke-before-fill, quick fill/stroke color selection palettes, perspective
projections, mesh fills and complex gradient fills.
CorelDraw
differentiates itself from its competitors in a number of ways:
The
first is its positioning as a graphics suite, rather than just a vector
graphics program. A full range of editing tools allow the user to adjust
contrast, color balance, change the format from RGB to CMYK, add special
effects such as vignettes and special borders to bitmaps. Bitmaps can also be
edited more extensively using Corel PhotoPaint, opening the bitmap directly
from CorelDraw and returning to the program after saving. It also allows a
laser to cut out any drawings.
CorelDraw
is capable of handling multiple pages along with multiple master layers.
Multipage documents are easy to create and edit and the Corel print engine
allows for booklet and other imposition so even simple printers can be used for
producing finished documents. One of the useful features for single and
multi-page documents is the ability to create linked text boxes across
documents that can be resized and moved while the text itself resets and flows
through the boxes. Useful for creating and editing multi-article newsletters
etc.
Smaller
items, like business cards, invitations etc., can be designed to their final
page size and imposed to the printer's sheet size for cost-effective printing.
An additional print-merge feature (using a spreadsheet or text merge file)
allows full personalization for many things like numbered raffle tickets,
individual invitations, membership cards and more.
CorelDraw's
competitors include Adobe Illustrator and Xara Photo & Graphic Designer.
Although all of these are vector-based illustration programs, the user experience
differs greatly between them. While these programs will read their native file
types and vice versa, the translation is rarely perfect. CorelDraw can open
Adobe PDF files: Adobe PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher and Word, and other
programs can print documents to PDF using the Adobe PDFWriter printer driver,
which CorelDraw can then open and edit every aspect of the original layout and
design. CorelDRAW can also open PowerPoint presentations and other Microsoft
Office formats with little or no problem.
2.3 CorelDraw Graphics Suite
Corel Capture X4
Over
time, additional components were developed or acquired and bundled with
CorelDraw. The list of bundled packages usually changes somewhat from one
release to the next, though there are several mainstays that have remained in
the package for many releases now, including PowerTrace (a bitmap to vector
graphic converter), Photo-Paint (a bitmap graphic editor), and Capture (a
screen capture utility).
The current version
of CorelDraw Graphics Suite X6 (version 16), contains the following packages:
CorelDraw
X6, an intuitive vector-illustration and page-layout application
Corel
Photo-Paint X6, an image-editing application
Corel
PowerTrace X6, a utility to convert bitmaps into editable vector graphics
Corel
Connect, a full-screen browser to search the suite’s digital content
Corel
Capture X6, a screen capture utility
Corel
Website Creator X6, new website creation software
CDR
file format
CorelDraw
file format Filename extension.cdr
Developed
by Corel Corporation
Type
of format Vector graphics,
raster graphics
Open
format? no
CDR
file format is a proprietary file format developed by Corel Corporation and
primarily used for vector graphic drawings. There is no publicly available CDR
file format specification.
Other
CorelDraw file formats include CorelDraw Compressed (CDX), CorelDraw Template
(CDT) and Corel Presentation Exchange (CMX).
In
December 2006 the sK1 open source project team started to reverse-engineer the
CDR format. The results and the first working snapshot of the CDR importer were
presented at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 conference taking place in May
2007 in Montreal (Canada). Later on the team parsed the structure of other
Corel formats with the help of the open source CDR Explorer. As of 2008, the sK1 project claims to have the
best import support for CorelDraw file formats among open source software
programs. The sK1 project developed also the UniConvertor, a command line open
source tool which supports conversion from CorelDraw ver.7-X4 formats
(CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX) to other formats. UniConvertor is also used in Inkscape
and Scribus open source projects as an external tool for CorelDraw files
importing.
In
2007, Microsoft blocked CDR file format in Microsoft Office 2003 with the
release of Service Pack 3 for Office 2003. Microsoft later apologized for
inaccurately blaming the CDR file format and other formats for security
problems in Microsoft Office and released some tools for solving this problem.
In
2012 the joint Libre Office/re-lab team implemented lib cdr, a library for
reading CDR files from v1 to the currently latest X6 version and CMX files. The
library has extensive support for shapes and their properties, including
support for color management and spot colors, and has a basic support for text.
The library provides a built-in converter to SVG, and a converter to Open Document
is provided by writerperfect package. The libcdr library is expected to be used
in LibreOffice 3.6, and thanks to public API it can be freely used by other
applications.
3.0 METHODOLOGY
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