Coral Draw & CoralXARA

[Britman]

Are Coral Draw and Coral XARA the same?
I've been looking at getting some biz cards doing and the company I'm looking at prefers and images to be in Coral Draw 8,9,10 or 11.
I notice xara has the option to save as .xar or .art.

Thanks

[Britman]

Are Coral Draw and Coral XARA the same?
I've been looking at getting some biz cards doing and the company I'm looking at prefers and images to be in Coral Draw 8,9,10 or 11.
I notice xara has the option to save as .xar or .art.

Thanks

[John Rayner]

Try saving your artwork as a .cdr or .cmx. hose are Corel formats. The .xar format is not read by any of the other major drawing programs. I am not sure why tho. I would imagine a plugin could be made for any of the other programs to read this format. Is the format too complex or proprietary, that would have to be answered by Charles and crew.

Corel had a contract to market xara for a while way back when but all they did was one release with no advertising then buried xara. When the contract was over xara hit the ground running, but has been playing catch up ever since. Xara was a better product, but instead of marketing it properly, corel tried to bury it alive. The very few of us lucky enough to stumble upon xara fell in love and have been staunch supporters ever since.

There has been 2 major relases and 1 minor release since corelxara. The changes to the software are well worth the cost of the program. I am on a limited budget, but I scrapped up the cash for the updates and feel the money was well spent.

[gwpriester]

You might also export your card in Adobe *AI file format if it is not too complex. If you do this, convert your text to editable shapes first. Otherwise it turns into a "dog's breakfast" when it gets into Illustrator.

Illustrator only supports Linear and Circular gradient fills. Any of Xara's other gradients will get turned into Flat or Linear fills.

Some bitmaps export OK into Illustrator, others don't. Bevels and Shadows do not import into Illustrator as Illustrator does not support there features.

Workbook 23 covers EPS and AI files and their creation.

Exporting your card as a Xara EPS file (again with fonts converted to editable shapes) might be the best approach.

CorelDRAW has an Import filter, PostScript Interpreted, which works very well with Xara EPS files and lets you use all Xara bells and whistles.

I do not like the CMX export option because it does not always include Xara's range of fills and effects.

And of course, a TIFF file at the proper resolution is always a good way to submit work to a printer.

Hope this helps.

If you are not embarrassed to show us your card design (you can post it as a GIF or JPEG image here) we can take a look and let you know the best way to send it to the printer.

Gary