Chapter 30
Exit, Stage Left: Exporting Files to Other Formats

Featuring

Those of you who produce and print your artwork entirely within DRAW won’t be interested in this section. The other 99 percent of you regularly, perhaps constantly, produce work that is designed to be incorporated into something else: a letter in your word processor, a brochure in PageMaker, a logo in Ventura Publisher, a background for a chart, a button on a Web page, or one of hundreds of other types of drawings that will find their way into other documents.

This is your exit ramp as you leave the familiar home territory of DRAW and head out into the rest of the known universe. Without doubt there will be some speed bumps along the way, so we’re here to provide travel advice so you can prevent your work from becoming road kill on the illustration highway.

Choosing Your Weapon

What format should you use to export your work? That depends entirely upon your purpose—the range of projects that involve exporting from DRAW has widened significantly in the last few years. There used to be only one reason to export: to place a drawing in a document that was ultimately to be printed. Today, you can export (or publish) from DRAW to the Web, to a portable document, to a presentation, or of course, to print. Each has its own rules of thumb, and we’ll be exploring some choices in more detail, but first let’s have a look at...

The Export Dialog

The Export dialog shown in Figure 30.1 is very similar to its Import counterpart; therefore, our recap here will be brief.

FIGURE 30.1  The Export dialog

The Basics

As with the Import and Open dialogs, the upper portion of the DRAW 9 Export dialog box is similar to Windows 95/98/NT dialogs in most other applications, meaning that from this dialog you can browse to any location on your hard drive, toggle details and list views of the contents of those drives, create new folders, rename folders, and cut, copy, and paste between the current folder and to any other you browse to within this dialog...again, essentially all the things that you could do in an Explorer window. The lower half of the dialog is where you’ll choose your exporting options, and we’ll discuss those next.

File Name

As you’ve probably already guessed, this is where you name the file to be exported. By default, this box will be prefilled using the name of your current drawing and the last-used export format. New to DRAW 9, the File Name box is also a drop-down list of your five most recently exported files. While this proves handier for importing and opening files, you may find this option an easy way to jump between recent export locations.

Files of Type

This is the list of all currently installed export filters. If you think you’re missing something, read the “Filter Madness” sidebar in Chapter 29. You’ll notice that CDR is not on this list. You cannot export a DRAW file to the CDR format; you must use Save (or Save As). Select the export format from this list.

Sort Type

New to DRAW 9, the export filter list can be sorted in eight different ways: By Extension, By Description, By Most Recently Used, Vector, Bitmap, Text, Animation, and Default. We refer you back to Chapter 29 for details.

Notes

Here you can add notes about the file you are exporting, which may be helpful to the recipient of that file. Not all formats support included notes, and the box will be grayed out for those that don’t.

Compression Type

Some export formats, notably bitmaps, include one or more compression options. If you know that the receiving application is compatible with the compression method, go ahead and choose one. Otherwise, we recommend the defaults.

Embed ICC Profile

Another new export option in DRAW 9, this allows an ICC color profile to be embedded into the file information. If the receiving application cannot use the information, it would be discarded. For more on ICC profiles, see Chapters 27 and 29.

No White Spaces, Special Characters

When exporting graphics created for the Web, you should not overlook this new feature. Spaces and other characters not supported on the Internet will be replaced by underscores. My Pretty Web Button.gif would become My_Pretty_Web_Button.gif.

Suppress Filter Dialog

Some file formats will open additional dialogs upon export from DRAW. If you always accept the defaults for these formats, you can safely enable this option, and the secondary dialogs will not appear. We recommend you do not check this box until you are familiar with the various export options.

Road Test Revisited

If you’ve read the last chapter on importing, our test file in Figure 30.2 will look familiar. This drawing contains examples of many different types of objects, including those with known tendencies to trip on their way out the door. The test file includes a spot color object; CMYK objects; text using both PostScript and TrueType fonts; an object with a dashed outline; a filled open curve; a 30-step blend; fountain, pattern, and texture fills; an arrowhead; a transparent lens; a mesh fill; a contour with a hairline outline; a powerclip; and both an RGB and a CMYK bitmap.

FIGURE 30.2  How well can DRAW export this demanding test file? That depends upon the export flavor...

As we explore the more popular export formats, we’ll explain what to choose and when, and tell you how our test file fared so that you’ll know what to expect on your own road trips through file exports. While we don’t have the space to explain every option available, we note here, and again during discussions on specific formats, that Corel’s online Help files have been updated and are a good resource for a filter’s features and limitations. If we don’t list it here, we don’t recommend it, having found other formats that do the job better.

Traditional and Other Printed Media

What is “traditional” media in these days when Web pages and graphics are so prevalent? It includes books, magazines, and other materials printed using commercial presses. The Internet may be everywhere you look, but it is not yet considered “traditional.” Here are the formats that speak to these traditions.