Is it possible to convert CorelDraw file to Freehand??

[Albacore]

I don't see a problem with what your trying to do as I publish a number of company reports with AI, InDesign and FH and it is all about talking to your printer. You can save money by doing your imposition yourself and saving each d/page spread as a separate file as long as you agree a price with your printer. Don't let them bully you! they either want your work or they don't, just ask another printer in your area.

[zarifkhan]

a biG thanks to Sally you really understood and i really appreciate your explination......and thanks for that file.....

RedWombat, i just made a format for one time and we just made little change when the C.E. command.....

and Albacore i got your point yes at first i feeling that but i thought that may be he don't know how to work in draw so he saying like that......btw, thanks for your help.......

thx all

[sallybode]

Actually today I had a booklet to build and a proof to get out. As I lay the booklet out in facing pages, I have a choice to send it as single page spreads or booked. It is to be printed on 8.5" x 11", folded and stapled, black plus a spot color. You can print to a .pdf as I said from Print Preview. In X3, it sees all printable files as portrait jobs so you always go into the advanced tab to set a landscape page size, even with a .pdf to keep the job from being rotated sideways. Why does DRAW do this? I guess to be more compliant with how most new presses are coming, as portrait presses. If you do print to Acrobat Professional you can change it to X-1 and set the level of PostScript within DRAW to the highest which is level 3. This will maintain your spot color as well as keeping your black, black and not splitting it to four colors. The standard way of printing to a .pdf is RGB, but you can change that as described. This makes booking a job for a fussy printer very easy and it really isn't much trouble for you. There is absolutely no reason to have to re-layout your book or booklet in Freehand. You can output with bleeds, crop marks, densitometer, increase flatness, increase your steps in a gradient, you have it all right there and as I burn plates as part of my job, any printer worth his salt can take such a .pdf and go right to plate with it, no problem. The convenience is you have your whole job right there. Some platemakers don't build a booklet like the one we have. We are a smaller print house so they didn't want such a big investment, even so, we output good printing.

[zarifkhan]

thanks so much, Sally.. would you pls send me some scripts for coreldraw i just want some new, cuz i have some from that site obren.com or like that i forgot the site but i got alot scripts from there i need some more if you have it i hope u will not mind pls share it to me...

zarif.designer@gmail.com

thx for ur help......

[sallybode]

The scripts I've accumulated are also from oberonplace.com and also from isocalc.com, they also have free scripts. Plus you can write your own. I have also some additional scrips which came with tutorials I have paid to download from unleash.com. I try and not share those as in the case the developer has asked for payment, it becomes like a copyright infringement on my part.

However, in writing your own, you can for instance record an action you'd like to repeat, save it as a script and then use it in CorelDRAW. Many of the extra tools I have discovered to use are actually in DRAW itself, but they have hidden away a function that you can drag out and use if you go into Tools/Options/Customization/Commands/. Yes there is a category in there called "Macros" and this is the same thing as "scripts". But you can go through the "All" and see if you find it useful, drag it out, play with it. Playing with the program is far more intuitive and fun than doing tutorials or reading books.

However, I highly recommend the tutorials available at unleash.com. Many are free but the ones which you can pay for, many I have tried, others, I didn't think I'd have a use for, so I haven't done all of them, but if they were of value to me I purchased them. And I was not at all ever disappointed.

The other thing I always recommend is a book: "CorelDRAW WOW", it is for version 3.0 through 9.0. Since many of the features of DRAW have not changed, there are many pointers in there that are quite good. Plus being an older book, it doesn't cost much to buy it either new or used on-line. The other book I'd recommend because it is a great reference and it has quite a large section on scripts is CorelDRAW 12.0 by Steve Bain. It is a huge book, but covers mostly DRAW.

I probably know enough about DRAW to take a stab at writing a book, what do you all think?

[zarifkhan]

thanks for your comments,
well i just have one question more.......
COULD WE HAVE A TABLE WHICH MADE IN MS WORD TO COREL DRAW BY SIMPALY COPY PASTING???? cuz when we copy past they change the format is there any other way to do that??????

[sallybode]

You can embed a Word File and it will generally not change format (Word is not WYSIWYG like Publisher so in all cases, let's say "Good Luck"), but if you don't have X3, I wouldn't recommend it. If you need to do any formatting changes in DRAW such as making sure it separates properlly for print, embedding isn't the answer as you have an inherently RGB OLE embedding that cannot become CMYK even if it is all black. The best way is to create a .pdf and import it into DRAW. DRAW 12 often recognizes .pdf made from Adobe Acrobat Professional as being "corrupt". But X3 doesn't, it imports reliably from all programs which make .pdf except, unfortuately, Xara Xtreme Pro. The advantage to working with the imported .pdf is that you still have editable text, however you are stuck with one line at a time text, if you know what I mean, try to get to the next line, isn't happening. In such a case copying to Notepad and then recopying and repasting into DRAW removes the leftover encoding from the .pdf file and allows you to completely edit text as you may like to do. Often times you also have text strings and not whole lines with imported .pdf, likewise with imported .eps, often one word at a time, which can be reconnected by selecting the text in the logical order then when all are selected, using Ctrl L, which recombines into one text string. (Ctrl K breaks your text into individual words if done once, but can break apart individual letters which are not curves but still text if you continue to hit Ctrl K). You can also rejoin text strings by copying sections of broken up text to the clipboard and pasting into NotePad. Sometimes it doesn't do a good job of recognizing the order, but other times it is a great way to get back to truly ediable text. You will have to hit the delete key a lot to get back to text that flows because each line is an Enter Key Stroke event. It is often easier to copy and paste sections of a Word document into CorelDRAW and recreate the page. If you need to get good placement, a Print Screen pasted into DRAW as the lowest layer without editablity and set to 50% opacity, makes a quick guide to text positioning. Then you have real text and no hangups. In the end this last method is my preference and as I know all my keyboarding shortcuts, it really isn't that long to do. I just Alt-Tab to get back to Word and copy the next section of text and I am on my way. So far I have not worked with the new Office documents which are out there. So I dont' know if there is any improvement there. But so long as those who use Word do not use proper page layout, which is not using your alignment tools to create center stack but use instead tabs and margin drags to format their document, and text blocks, importing from Word will continue to be a pain. As folks seem to think that they have a wonderful layout for print and a color separation for say, Red and Black in Word, Word cannot do that. It's a pain in the butt, once familiar with the various methods available, pick the method which hurts least.

You can embed a MS Word file in DRAW, open MS Word, select all (if multipage just select all on one page). And paste special, selecting Microsoft Word Document. This will create an OLE link to the MS Word Document. In X3, you keep humming along at the usual pace, but editing anything after embedded a Word Doc. in 12, 12 comes to an excrutiating halt, not as bad if you can pursuade the Word Doc. to go into a PowerClip, better answer if you must do this in 12 is to paste the embedding into a new document, create a .pdf in 12 if you don't have Acrobat Professional. 12 can import its own .pdf creations, now you have a document which will not cause 12 to halt up or crash. 12 runs better with the updates for it but embedding from 12 is just plain miserable without the help of .pdf. If you work under a time constraint as I do, always meeting a deadline, finding a viable workaround that is relatively quick beats dealing with the horrible time delays. Additionally, when you have others working in DRAW in an art department, leaving your file in a manner that others can easily edit is essential good working manners and keeps you on amiable terms with others in the office.