Symbols, dingbats, etc

[Amer2828]

Hi and thanks for any help.

I use simple type clip art that could best be described as symbols or dingbats in coreldraw. They are one color simple things like a steaming cup of coffee in one color where basically you have a cup and steam but not where the cup has numerous colors or is layered, etc - to be clear again - it is more like a symbol than clip art because of the one or two colors involved and its simplicity. Another example would be where you might have a handgun and show a black filled one color version of the gun with its trigger, etc but not a very detailed version of the gun, all its lines, etc, etc

Hope that makes sense to someone.

Does anyone know of a searchable library or collection - online or in cd format - where I can have only simple "symbol" or dingbat choices but a lot of them ?

Thanks!

[sallybode]

The best searchable database is to use ROMCat which is free and is available from Unleash.com with full instructions as to how to set it up. It works with the Clipart which comes stock with each CorelDRAW CD. You must install your clipart into one folder on a drive which you have on your computer, for instance, if you put it on your thumb drive, fine, but you have to have you thumb drive available when you use it. Best of all if you have several versions of CorelDRAW, it can combine to search them all at one time. And there are many one-color clipart graphics included.

There are also many decorative fonts available for free at dafont.com, however there is no searchable method of finding what you want that way. ROMCat can also search your own clipart, but you have to save it properly for it to do so. I looks for keywords which are one thing you can save when you save a CorelDRAW file in "Options", which expands to give you these extras.

So if you find a font you can store it as individual CorelDRAW files and add to your Clipart Library.

ROMCat also works with CorelMAGIC which sadly is no longer for sale but sometimes people sell it for really cheap on EBay. If you don't have a lot of versions of CorelDRAW and need a clipart library which is searchable, this is your best option.

And.... not to be long-winded (too late) HP older scanner featuring Precison Pro Scan software are able to scan as .wmf (Windows MetaFile) which is a vector format, and this can be recolored as you choose with an Oberonplace.com script for DRAW. The older scanners had this capacity and are not that expensive and work great. One of the best investments a graphic artist can make. I have one and use them at works. Really, two-thumbs up for HP, too bad they let that feature go. It works much better than scanning as a bitmap and then vectorizing with CorelTRACE or the new improved PowerTRACE in X3. Even better, Gman, than VectorEye and Inkscape.