CorelDRAW 9 for Windows - Softcover

Davis, Phyllis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201354519 ISBN 13: 9780201354515

Publisher: Peachpit Pr, 1999

Synopsis

Popular among home and business users alike, CorelDRAW is a complete set of tools for creating drawings, illustrations, and multipage documents. With version 9's powerful new features and redesigned interface, you can produce anything from birthday cards to design plans to Web sites. Whether you've depended on CorelDRAW for years or have never used an art program before, you'll find exactly what you need to get right to work in CorelDRAW 9 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide.

The book is divided into concise, clearly tabbed sections, each of which builds on previously discussed topics. Thanks to its step-by-step instructions and bountiful screenshots, newcomers to the program will be up and drawing right away. And CorelDRAW veterans will find CorelDRAW 9: VQS a handy reference guide to learning the latest features and discovering new techniques for creating amazing effects.

About this title

About the Author

Phyllis Davis, a principal of Evolution Software, Inc., is a writer, instructor, graphic designer, and software developer. Among her author credits is Peter Norton's Guide to Visual Basic 4 for Windows 95 (Sams). She has numerous design credits for books, fine art posters, and advertisements.

From the Back Cover

Popular among home and business users alike, CorelDRAW is a complete set of tools for creating drawings, illustrations, and multipage documents. With version 9's powerful new features and redesigned interface, you can produce anything from birthday cards to design plans to Web sites. Whether you've depended on CorelDRAW for years or have never used an art program before, you'll find exactly what you need to get right to work in CorelDRAW 9 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide.

The book is divided into concise, clearly tabbed sections, each of which builds on previously discussed topics. Thanks to its step-by-step instructions and bountiful screenshots, newcomers to the program will be up and drawing right away. And CorelDRAW veterans will find CorelDRAW 9: VQS a handy reference guide to learning the latest features and discovering new techniques for creating amazing effects.

Reviews

Unlike Photoshop, which "paints" large flat areas, CorelDRAW is a vector design tool that creates individual objectsAusually lines and areas that are separate from each other and that can be manipulated in a drawing for different effects. CorelDRAW shares the vector market with Macromedia's FreeHand and Adobe's Illustrator. These two titles are excellent introductions for new users.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Although CorelDRAW was originally designed with desktop publishing in mind, it has evolved along with the rest of the design community to support the World Wide Web. In versions 7 and 8, you can publish your graphics at the appropriate resolution and color depth and with HTML links established.

CorelDRAW is not only a great resource for generating web graphics, but also a good tool for organization. You can use it as a sketch pad to create a owchart, mapping out your design and roughing out pages. You can also work out your navigation strategy and icons. Because of the object-oriented nature of CorelDRAW, you can later ne-tune your roughs to make your nal graphics.

Preparing Artwork For The Web
When you prepare art for the web, you want it to look good and download fast. You want the colors to be accurate and predictable - you want your graphics to look the same to web visitors as they look on your own computer. At the same time, you don't want visitors to give up and move on to another site because your graphics take too long to download. Although we can't provide a complete treatise on balancing color delity with transfer speed, here are some general tips.

Keeping Files Small
Make the elements as small as you can and still create the impression you want.
If you use Fountain lls, orient the color gradient top-to-bottom rather than side-to-side or diagonally. Because of the compression scheme used in GIF les, vertical color gradients compress much smaller than the others.
Use web page backgrounds made of small repeating tiles. The small tile has to be downloaded only once to ll the entire background, which is a lot faster than downloading a large background image.File FormatsThere are two le formats that CorelDRAW can produce that are compact and commonly used for preparing web graphics:
Use JPEG (.jpg) for continuous-tone art such as photos or paintings - art that involves many subtle color or texture differences.
Use Compuserve GIF (.gif) for at-color, object-oriented artwork. If you're using a version of CorelDRAW that supports the GIF89a format, you may want to use GIF for continuous-tone images that aren't rectangular, because you can designate part of the image as transparent, which makes it easy to silhouette it against a background.

In CorelDRAW 8 the JPEG and GIF export dialog boxes give you a great deal of control over image size and quality, including on-screen previews that let you see in advance how your choices will affect your image. (These dialogs are also available in PHOTO-PAINT 8).

Resolution

Compared to CorelDRAW 8, earlier versions create fairly chunky bitmap graphics, especially at actual size for use on a web site (using the 75 dpi Resolution setting). One way to avoid this problem is to export it at twice actual size (150 dpi), and then use the Image, Resample command in PHOTO-PAINT, or choose Image, Image Size in Photoshop to reduce the resolution down to the 72 dpi used for web graphics. Photoshop and PHOTO-PAINT do a much better job of anti-aliasing bitmaps than the pre-8 CorelDRAW File, Export function. Color

If you're creating web graphics using CorelDRAW 3, 4, 5, or 6, you'll need to use a utility such as Debabelizer to ensure that the color in your artwork is browser-safe - that is, to keep your graphics from changing color when viewed on various computers and to reduce the number of colors in your image to the ones you need, discarding any additional colors in the palette and thus shedding le size.

In CorelDRAW 7 and 8 you can start with a browser-specic palette, such as the Netscape or Internet Explorer palette, to ensure that you don't build your graphics with colors outside of the browser's capability (choose a palette from the View, Color Palette yout). And the GIF 89a export function automatically reduces the number of colors to those used in your graphic.

Choosing Good Alternatives

There are some web graphics jobs that you can do in CorelDRAW but you probably shouldn't. CorelDRAW provides the capabilities you need to generate most web graphics, but it's better to use a web-page-specic application such as Microsoft's Front Page, Adobe PageMill, Net Objects Fusion, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Adobe GoLive to assemble the actual web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peachpit Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201354519
• ISBN 13: 9780201354515
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 322