Issue link: https://nbm.uberflip.com/i/1488543
9 0 G R A P H I C S P R O • J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 3 G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M S O F T W A R E T I P S & T R I C K S | D O U G Z E N D E R Doug Zender has used CorelDRAW extensively since version 4. His goal is to minimize the intimidation of the program and give users the sense that CorelDRAW is a friend, not an adversary. Doug began as a design artist, then moved into the sign industry in 1992 doing vinyl graphics. You can contact him at dezender1@gmail.com. CorelDRAW Basics Boosting your text creativity I have written numerous articles about CorelDRAW for this magazine, but recently while perusing those articles, it occurred to me that I had never talked about some of the basic functions of the program. I hope, here, to share some of that. e following informa- tion may be a bit superfluous and boring for some users, but for others, it may be the very thing they need to thrive with the program. To begin, I guess that the differences of a good place to start. Most of our design projects involve some form of text. Most often we use Artistic text, which is simply a click with the text tool and Artistic text and Paragraph text may be begin typing. e resulting text can easily be resized as needed... stretched, skewed, font size, or manipulated as one desires. If you select the Shape tool on an Artistic text object, there are options to manipulate each text character separately... Size, angle, height, etc. See Fig. 1 in which I have manipulated each text character for a unique look. In Fig. 2, there are two possibilities for this text. e first is simply a straight-forward typ- ing of the text using "Sarah Script." But I wanted something more dynamic, so I chose to make some changes. To get the second image, with the shape tool I first clicked on the little square associated with the "L" and "C" and chose "Diner" as the font to use for these characters, and then had to change it slightly to match the size. B U S I N E S S S T R A T E G I E S e "y" in Lucky seemed a bit unusual, so I replaced it with an alternate character that was included with the "Sarah Script" font. To achieve this, in the text dialog, (Text > insert character) I chose Insert Character from the drop down and double-clicked on the alter- nate character I wanted. (Depending on the version of CorelDR AW you are using, it all may be a bit different, but should be similar with all versions) project, you first choose the text tool and use it to draw a text bounding box. When you click the box, you can begin entering text. Paragraph text is a bit different than Artistic text in that to begin a paragraph text is is mostly used for large bodies of text. ere are several options available... Drop Caps, Wrap Text and a few others. We'll first look at Drop Caps as can be seen in this presenta- tion. Unfortunately, it applies to all previous paragraphs and cannot, as near as I can tell, be altered to include only a single selection. In this case I chose "Georgia Bold" for all the Drop Caps. To access this feature, one must select a character with the little square asso- ciated with it, with the shape tool and, on the task bar, choose Text > Drop caps and a dia- log opens with some sizing options. As one works with this feature, it becomes clearer how it works. Wrap text is our next concern. Many times we are writing a piece that includes some kind of image and we want it to be included within Fig. 1: I have manipulated each text character for a unique look. (Images courtesy Doug Zender)