PART I
A Quick Tour Of CorelDRAW

Chapter 1
A Tour of the Tools

Featuring

Most long-term users are amazed at how different each version of CorelDRAW appears from the previous one. Corel’s engineering team seems to work eight days a week through the entire calendar year to come up with a bevy of new features, and usually at least one entirely new application every 12 to 18 months. While Chapter 2 focuses on what has changed in versions 8 and 9, here you’ll read about what has stayed the same. From one version to the next, CorelDRAW’s essential look and feel—its heart and soul, really—have remained unswervingly consistent. This chapter is for new or occasional CorelDRAW users seeking an overview of the program, or for more experienced users who want to brush up on their fundamentals.

	NOTE CorelDRAW 9 is a 32-bit application and will not run under Windows 3.x. It will run only on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0.

As with most 32-bit Windows programs (95 and later), all of the CorelDRAW modules consist of menus that you pull down, dialog boxes that you invoke, and tools that you click. Most of the functions, across all the CorelDRAW modules, can be accessed from both keyboard and mouse. We will likely harp a bit throughout the book on favorite hotkeys, as we believe them to be invaluable for those seeking efficiency and economy of motion. (And what’s fair is fair, so we’ll also complain a bit about some very strange key mnemonics, and others that are inexplicably absent.)

Surfing the Interface

This chapter is akin to the couch-potato activity of cruising via remote control every single television station offered by your cable provider. We won’t stop long at any one of them—we’ll surf.

Figure 1.1 shows the essential interface for DRAW, the main module of the CorelDRAW suite of programs. Veteran users will note that the DRAW 9 screen looks markedly similar to that of earlier versions, perhaps identical. On the other hand, your screen might look slightly different from the one shown here because video cards, color palettes, your preferred Windows Display Properties, and your screen resolution all affect the appearance of Windows applications.

FIGURE 1.1  DRAW may overwhelm you with its depth, but its interface has remained clean and uncluttered since version 1.

The 14 icons along the left side of the work area make up DRAW’s toolbox , providing access to the most common commands and functions of the program. The Standard toolbar below the menus provides access to other frequently used commands, while the property bar below that offers context-sensitive controls. In other words, the icons and shortcuts on the property bar change as you use the program. If you are creating a rectangle, the property bar displays controls to edit the rectangle; if you are creating text, the property bar offers text-editing and formatting commands.

DRAW owes much of its success to its clean interface. Even if you have never used a drawing program, you can probably draw a blue circle in DRAW for the first time without too many wrong turns. And once you know the most basic of maneuvers—click on the tool, move to the page, click and drag, and click on a fill color—you are all set to create not just rectangles, but ovals, text blocks, lines, stars and other polygons, and free-form objects. In mastering this maneuver, you also automatically know how to zoom in on parts of your drawing, group and ungroup objects, and change the basic shape of curves.

All these operations result from one set of motions:

1.  Click on the desired tool.

2.  Move your cursor out over the drawing page.

3.  Press and hold Button 1 on your mouse.

4.  Drag the mouse across the page.

5.  Let go of the mouse button.

NOTE We try to avoid “dexteritism”—discrimination on the basis of one’s dexterity, that is. So instead of “right-click” and “left-click,” we would prefer “Button 1” (the primary mouse button, the left one for most users) and “Button 2” (the secondary mouse button). Unfortunately, Microsoft has officially coined and sanctioned “right-click” as the term for clicking with Button 2 to pull down a context-sensitive menu, and it will be hard for us to avoid it. Nonetheless, when it comes to plain old clicking or clicking-and-dragging, we’ll use Button 1 and Button 2 to keep them distinct.

We’re only exaggerating a little bit when we say that once you have learned this procedure, you have learned about 90 percent of the motions required to drive the program. Of course, knowing how to press on the accelerator doesn’t give you license to drive a car, and this tool is not capable of creating fine art on its own. For that matter, total expertise with DRAW won’t turn you into a fine artist if you weren’t one already, and this is a point that we will continue to drive home throughout this book. Becoming a capable DRAW user requires vision, good judgment, experience, and lots of practice. Couple that with a knowledge of the arts, and you’re on your way to becoming a successful electronic illustrator.

The Supporting Actors

Many parts of DRAW’s face are leased from Windows itself. Like practically every Windows program, all of the CorelDRAW modules include:

•  A title bar listing the name of the application and/or the particular file opened, with Minimize/Maximize/Restore/Close buttons to control the DRAW window

•  A menu bar that provides access to most of the program’s functions and commands

•  At least one row of icons for reaching the most frequently used commands

•  Scroll bars for moving to other parts of a drawing, and page icons and tabs for scrolling through pages (if a drawing contains more than one)

•  The DRAW balloon icon at the top-left corner of the screen, for quickly sizing and closing DRAW or the current window

It would be nearly impossible to find a Windows program today that doesn’t offer File, Edit, and View as its first three menu choices, or that doesn’t offer some sort of button or toolbar with icons that provide shortcuts to commands and functions. DRAW is no exception.