PART VIII
Taking Control

Chapter 31
Using Styles

Featuring

Time is a luxury those in the graphics business usually aren’t allowed. When the big client wants the slides done tomorrow, you order some take-out and settle in for a long night. As the clock ticks on, you can’t afford to waste time repeating commands over and over while formatting text and graphics. CorelDRAW’s styles and templates are the answer: you can store frequently used formatting attributes and reapply them later with a click of the mouse. Who knows—with a little help from styles and templates, you might be able to catch your favorite late-night talk show after all.

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first focuses on creating and applying text and graphic styles. The second section discusses templates, which store styles and other page-layout information. The third section deals with color styles. And because we’re here in the back of the book, in a part entitled “Taking Control,” we assume that you know your way around the program.

What Is a Style?

A style is a collection of formatting attributes, such as color and font, which can be applied to text or graphic objects quickly and easily. Rather than assigning each of the attributes individually (selecting the color, choosing the face, adjusting the outline width, and so forth), you can apply a style that defines all these attributes in one quick step.

Styles are saved in the .cdr file and, if you choose, in a DRAW template file. Saving styles in a template allows you to use the styles with other drawings. How styles and templates work together is discussed in detail later in this chapter.

Desktop publishing and word processing applications have long been able to create text styles, and so can DRAW—but DRAW lets you create styles for graphics as well. For instance, the attributes of a graphic style might be a texture fill with a 3-point outline. DRAW’s text styles are separated into artistic text and paragraph text styles.

The power of styles goes beyond speed—styles also help you achieve consistency in design. They help guarantee that every title in a project uses the same font, style, and color, adding to the overall appeal and professional appearance of your work. You can also establish a dynamic connection between all objects using a particular style. This connection allows you to change the attributes of the style—the fill color, for instance—and thus affect the fill color of every object that uses that style.

Suppose you are in charge of producing a weekly sales presentation. By creating styles for the presentation’s graphic objects and for the title and body text, you’re giving yourself a head start on building the next presentation. The styles are saved in a template, and the template is used to build the next presentation. (As you’ll see, templates can even store objects such as the slide background and a company logo.) Say you get halfway through the project and realize the body text needs to be smaller. Simply change the body text style, and all text with that style also changes. Suddenly, that weekly task doesn’t sound so bad.

	NOTE The Copy Attributes From command is another way to apply formatting to several objects in a drawing. In this case, however, the objects are not linked, so changes made in one object do not affect other objects with the same formatting. When you use styles, any change to a style affects all objects using that style.

Using the Styles Docker

In DRAW 8 and 9, styles are managed with the Styles docker. To open it in 9, you have three choices:

•  Go to Tools Ø Graphic and Text Styles.

•  Go to Window Ø Dockers Ø Graphic and Text Styles (every docker across the program can be opened from Windows Ø Dockers).

•  Press Ctrl+F5.

As you can see in Figure 31.1, graphic, paragraph text, and artistic text styles appear on the Graphic and Text page of the docker.

FIGURE 31.1  Press Ctrl+F5 to quickly display the Styles docker.

We have several things to point out about this docker:

•  On our screen, the names of the styles might appear smaller than on yours. The default is to show large icons, but we prefer small ones. We right-clicked on an empty portion of the docker and chose View Ø Small Icons.

•  The small triangle at the top-right of the docker provides access to many of the commands relevant to styles, but you can also get there by right-clicking white space in the docker. We find that to be easier—a much bigger target.

•  For as long as we can remember, these nine styles have been present in Corel’s default template. We see no reason for having six bullet styles in a program whose emphasis is graphics and we see nothing that warrants three of the bullets to be called Special. Yet it has been that way since DRAW 3.

•  Also for several years now, the hard-coded sort order has Default Paragraph Text being placed between Bullet 1 and Bullet 2. But hey, we don’t develop it, we just write about it...

Unless you have loaded another template, the styles that appear in the docker are those of DRAW’s main template, coreldrw.cdt. You can load a different template of styles, make modifications to the default template, or pay no attention to templates whatsoever. We’ll talk about templates soon.

The icons attached to each style name indicate the type of style. As you can see, the A denotes an artistic text style, the document icon marks a paragraph text style, and the square and triangle icon is the symbol for a graphic style. DRAW lets you decide which types of styles are displayed in the docker. By default, all style types are shown, but if you never create paragraph text, you could instruct DRAW to only show you the artistic text and graphic styles, and then you’d never see those special bullets again. You can do this from the context menu (right-click on the docker).

	TIP Select the Auto-view option to see only styles for the type of object selected. For instance, when a block of artistic text is selected, only the artistic text styles are displayed in the docker.