The View Menu

The View menu takes charge of almost all on-screen activities. These controls let you specify which parts of the DRAW interface you want to make visible or keep hidden, as well as how much detail of your drawing’s components you want displayed. Notice the viewing choices of Simple Wireframe, Wireframe, Draft, Normal, and Enhanced, and the large number of on-screen controls to toggle on and off. This is also the home of DRAW’s snap controls—Snap to Grid, Guidelines, and Objects.

DRAW 8 introduced viewable guides to show you the printable area of the page, and new to DRAW 9 are guides to show you the “bleed” line—the extension off of the page (1/4 inch by default) to which you should size objects that are designed to be printed to the edge of the illustration. (Print shops ask you to take objects beyond the edge of the page to insure against an object not going far enough and leaving a small streak where the ink didn’t get applied to the paper. By extending—bleeding—by an extra 1/4 inch, there is no chance of that happening.)

The Layout Menu

The Layout menu has shrunk considerably in DRAW 9, with the exodus of the snaps. We think it should have been renamed to the Page menu, as the seven commands that make up the menu all have to do with page controls—adding, deleting, and configuring pages, including the new Switch Page Orientation, which addresses the ability to have pages with different orientations, all in the same drawing.

The Arrange Menu

If it needs to be ordered, layered, aligned, collected, skewed, stretched, moved, taken apart, or put back together again, it’s a job for the Arrange menu. Here you can insist that two objects be moved and sized together with the Group, Combine, or Weld commands, or coupled more exotically with the Intersection and Trim commands.

The drawings you create in DRAW will include many different shapes and objects layered in just the right way to create the effect you want. The Order flyout has the commands for moving objects to the front and back of the stack and for moving items forward and back one layer. Like many seasoned DRAW users, you will want to commit to memory the keyboard shortcuts for these commands, because they are nested somewhat inconveniently a level below the other functions in the Order flyout. You’ll find the key assignments displayed on the flyout itself.

New to the Arrange menu in DRAW 8 were the Lock commands—Lock Object, Unlock Object, and Unlock All Objects. You won’t have to worry about those accidents that can knock your perspective out of whack—just lock the graphic up tight when you’ve got it the way you want it. And new to DRAW 9 is the way-cool Convert Outline to Object command, with which you can treat an object’s outline as a separate object, allowing you to apply any fill or effect to it.

The Effects Menu

This used to be DRAW’s most happening place, housing all of its special effects. But now it’s a sparse house, with most of the celebrities having moved out and taken up residence on the flyout as interactive tools. Lens still lives there and so do PowerClip and Add Perspective. The other commands address bitmap transformations and controls for the Natural Media tool.

You’ll probably head there most to access the Clear, Copy, and Clone commands that work on special effects.

The Bitmaps Menu

The Bitmaps menu introduces many of the powerful features found in PHOTO-PAINT, for use with imported bitmaps. For examples of the cooler effects, see Part VI, “The Bitmap Era.”

The Text Menu

The Text menu is your supermarket for text formatting and editing, and a wide assortment of powerful tools can be found here. The Fit Text to Path command is perhaps the most widely used special effect in all of DRAW history.

On the other hand, Thesaurus, which is available on the Writing Tools flyout, might be the least-used command. As DRAW continues to increase its support for text-heavy documents, word processing features might see more action; as of now, however, they lie almost dormant (at least, so say demographic studies across thousands of DRAW 4 through 8 users). We will concede that Type Assist, also in the Writing Tools flyout, introduced to little fanfare in version 5, has found its niche and provides valuable services for typists looking for a few shortcuts or assurances of professional typography, such as true quotes and em-dashes.

DRAW 8 introduced HTML support—no big surprise there—so you can now turn the text you are typing into HTML-compatible text for linking, formatting, and displaying on the Web.

The Tools Menu

The Tools menu is the electronic equivalent of the tool shed you may have out back, or the large peg board hanging in your garage. Before embarking on a big project, make a stop here and pull down the various tools that you will need along the way. Most of these tools existed in previous versions but were scattered across various menus.

The Window Menu

This window has seen the most change in DRAW 9. Once the modest domicile for DRAW’s Multiple Document Interface services, now all sorts of new tenants occupy it. Most notably, you can get a list of all palettes, dockers, and toolbars that DRAW offers.

The Help Menu

This menu is the conventional gateway to DRAW’s Help system. CorelTUTOR offers step-by-step instructions and can also act like a Wizard, completing a given task on its own as you observe. If you have used earlier versions of DRAW and are upgrading to DRAW 9, check out CorelTUTOR to get an overview of new features and familiarize yourself with the newest offerings in the program.