Four-Page Spread?

[Oramue]

Kind of miffed, at the moment.

I do a lot of the design work for our company and I've recently been granted a copy of DRAW X3. Before, I was stuck using Publisher.

In the past weeks, I've been going through the process of "converting" all of my Publisher files. Re-creation is really fun, but I've run into a major problem!

Basically, the Publisher file I had printed was a four-page spread, folded in half, printed on both sides on 11x17. For the life of me I cannot reproduce this layout size in DRAW! I even contacted Corel's e-mail support and they said what I wanted to do was "outside of standard installation and configuration"..I don't really want to pay for tech support.

Anyone here have any idea what I could do? Surely, surely, surely DRAW is capable of such a thing.

[RedWombat]

Are you trying to make a booklet?

11 x 17 page landscaped and folded to have an 8 1/2 x 11 booklet portrait.

[sallybode]

You can paste your 11" x 17" signature together yourself, or what is more likely, is that the Publisher file has been done in facing pages. The same is available in CorelDRAW, you just need to go to page layout, and turn on facing pages, but don't do it just yet.

Note: if you select all and group, then copy and paste into DRAW, when facing pages are one, you will paste in between them, on the gudder. However facing pages can be turned on and off at your convenience. Without facing pages on with your paper set at 8.5" x 11", when you paste, if the paste isn't just perfectly in the center, just his "p", and it will center your paste to the center of the page.

Once you have done all your importing, you can turn on your facing pages on and probably leave them on. In order to print, you need to go to the print preview choice and inside there, you need to change your layout to "booklet". From here, CorelDRAW will put your pages together for you the way they need to be in order to print on 11 x 17. This part works a lot differently than publisher. Once you get used to it, it is very easy.

The good news is that nearly everything in Publisher can be imported this way into DRAW, the bad news is that if the layout was all done in the Text Art headlines, you will find you have to go into a dialogue box to copy it and then reformat it inside of DRAW once you paste the text. There are some items that don't always come over, such as a long dash "Alt-0151" and some special characters, so whenever you do this, you will need to do some proof reading before you decide it is going to the printer. You may get "?" when DRAW doesn't recognize the character.

CorelDRAW can do color separations, which Publisher isn't able to do, but just bringing in the publication is just part of the work. If you are doing a two or three color newsletter, your text comes in as RGB, not the "K", i.e. "BlacK" of CMYK. No problem if your publication is being printed with only black ink, but it does make a difference when you are using spot color, because the type will split then to CMYK. Just select all your text and color it black from the right-hand palette. Your pictures, will also need to be changed. Not all pictures come in nicely, they come in as they were before someone stretched them to fit the Publisher document. And if you are doing spot color, you'll need to convert them to Grayscale. They may look gray but may have actually the colorspace of RGB and someone just desaturated them. Make them 300dpi for print. Find and Replace for text is not about formatting it. The eyedropper tool is very useful with recoloring lots of things.

You can use the help menu in DRAW to make a booklet and what to select in print preview to make it work.

I'd suggest getting some books on DRAW, not just what ships with it, and some tutorials which you will find available at Unleash.com. There are also some free tutorials on DRAW at clicknlearn.com. You must be using Internet Explorer, however to use the tutorials. DRAW is a professional program, and whereas it is more user friendly than say Adobe Illustrator, knowing what you can do with it and how to use shortcuts will speed your work up and help you figure things out when things seem to go wrong.

Mostly, it isn't that DRAW is full of bugs as people say, but that DRAW needs you to understand how it thinks, and when you use DRAW as it wants to be used, it runs all day without a crash. I do nearly all my work everyday in DRAW and I have had about three crashes in a year.

[Oramue]

Well, it was laughably easy to accomplish what I wanted. I was overthinking things and going by the diagrams that Corel defaults to. I thought a booklet had to have 8 pages.

I actually prefer DRAW, to be honest. I wasn't trying to say negative things about it. I'm just new at using it and I'm having to retrain my brain.

My only real problem with Corel is their support has brushed me off several times, pointing me to useless links and telling me to call support. That's more a company problem and not a program problem.

Thanks for the tips!

[sallybode]

The company has to pay these people so as far as free help, talk forums where members help each other is really more affordable. There is a lot of change in terminology between programs, once you see the change in jargon, it gets a lot easier.

Once you learn how things are called in DRAW it makes talking to a printer a lot easier. DRAW is primarily aimed at producing pieces that will be printed. It is CMYK by default, whereas almost everything else is RGB by default.