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When and When Not to Use
Styles
Styles are designed to save you time. Here are some tips for deciding
if you need to create a style:
- When you want to manage the attributes of
many objects. A styles greatest value is the collective control
it gives you over the appearance of multiple objects. You never have
to worry about one of them being wrongtheyre either all
correct or theyre all wrong.
- When you have several attributes you want
to apply at once. Simply make the changes to one object, save the changes
to the style, and all objects using that style will automatically display
the new formatting.
- When you anticipate that you might be changing
all instances of one color, fill, or outline in a complex drawing. With
styles, tracking down and changing all occurrences of a particular attribute
gets done in one or two steps rather than 10 or 20 or more.
- When you want to control elements across
multiple pages or even multiple files. Styles can be saved in templates
(described in the upcoming section), so they can be used with various
projects, like a monthly publication or newsletter.
Sometimes, other tools will work better than styles. Here are situations
where you may want to choose another strategy:
- You already have a custom palette created,
and you want to quickly assign colors to objects. Though you could create
several styles containing these colors, using a palette is a better
method.
- You want one or more objects to look exactly
like an original; this is a job for the Clone command. Clones dont
need to be applied or updated; they automatically and instantly take
on all the appearance attributes of the master object.
- You want to borrow just one attribute of
a formatted object and are not interested in maintaining a direct connection
to that object with a style. Though you could apply the style and then
strip off the attributes you dont want, its wasted effort.
A better way is to use either Edit Ø
Copy Properties From, or Effects Ø
Copy. Both commands let you choose the particular attribute you want
to copy from an existing object. This is better than using a style when
all you want is a piece of the style.
And finally, some situations call for yet another CorelDRAW efficiency
expert: scripts. Well get to them in Chapter 33.
Working with Templates
Templates help you organize and manage styles. You can store a group
of styles in a template designed for a specific type of drawing, such
as a slide presentation or a sales brochure. Template files store more
than just styles, though; they can also save page-layout information and
text and graphic objects. A template for a slide presentation could include
the page setup and the company logo, as well as styles for bullets and
titles. A template for sales brochures might contain the graphic elements
that appear in every brochure. In addition to the templates you create
yourself, DRAW includes several hundred predesigned templates for everything
from announcements to box designs.
Templates are separate files with extensions of .cdt instead
of .cdr. They contain all of the formatting and styles
you choose to store in them. This is convenient for your regularly recurring
projects, because you can keep all the styles you use for a particular
project or client in a template, safely protected from your day-to-day
activities. DRAW always starts with the default template, coreldrw.cdt,
loaded, but changing to a different template is easy.
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| NOTE When you create styles,
you dont have to save them in a templateDRAW stores them
directly in the drawing (the .cdr file). If you dont
save the styles in a template, the styles are loaded in the Styles
docker when you open the .cdr file that you saved them
in. But unless you save the styles in a template, theyll only
be available to the drawing you created them in. The advantage to
saving them in a template is that they are available in other DRAW
drawings, as well.
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The Default
Template
The coreldrw.cdt template includes default styles for
graphics, artistic text, and paragraph text. You can modify this template
by adding styles or changing the default styles, following the procedures
already outlined in this chapter. After making style changes, if you want
the changes to be available in future drawings using this template, you
must save it. If you dont, the new and modified styles are only
saved in the .cdr filethey do not become part of
the template.
To save changes to the default coreldrw.cdt template,
select Template Ø Save As Default
for New Documents from the dockers context menu. You can also use
Template Ø Save As to explicitly save
over the top of coreldrw.cdtthese two actions would
have the same result of altering DRAWs default template. And for
good measure, you can achieve the same result by going to Tools Ø
Options Ø Document, checking Save
Options As Defaults for New Documents, and then browsing the list of settings
whose current conditions you could choose to be defaults.
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| NOTE Coreldrw.cdt
is a plain old file, residing on your hard drive like all other files.
Therefore, before you start any wild experiments with your default
settings, you might want to back up this default template first. Youll
find it in the Draw subdirectory under the main CorelDRAW 9 directory.
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Creating
a New Template
Instead of filling up coreldrw.cdt with all kinds of different
styles, you may find it more effective to save particular groups of styles
in individual templates. Then, when youre ready for a certain set
of styles, you can just load the desired template.
As mentioned earlier, DRAWs templates can contain more than just
styles; they can contain any element that would normally go into a drawing.
With templates, you can give yourself a major-league running start toward
the completion of a repetitive project. You can create the template before
youve made style changes, before youve laid out the page,
and before you have created objects; or you can do it afterward. In fact,
its probably more practical to save the template after making these
changes to a drawing, so you dont have to continue to tweak it as
you refine your work.
You must use the Styles docker (Ctrl+F5) to create templates because
the object context menu does not provide access to template creation (only
style creation). So to create a template, you select Template Ø
Save As from the dockers context menu and name the template. If
you just want the styles from the current drawing, youre done. If
you want the page layout and the elements on the page also, click the
With Contents option to save the page setup and any text and graphic objects
that may be in the document you plan on making a template.
In Figure 31.5, we are about to save the current lineup of styles as
a template for newsletter creation. Note that we have created several
new artistic text styles and that we have eliminated all of those dreadful
bullet styles. Note two other things:
- We have checked With Contents, so the elements
on the page will be part of our starting point for creating newsletters.
- We are saving the template in the Draw directory,
where coreldrw.cdt is located. We note this because it
is not the factory-defined location for saving templates. We tried saving
templates in the Template subdirectory, but we didnt like it,
because that is not where coreldrw.cdt resides. Alternating
between coreldrw.cdt and ours in another subdirectory
became annoying. We prefer to keep them all in one location, so DRAW
can continue to look in the same place. If Corels engineers wanted
us to use the Template subdirectory, they should have put coreldrw.cdt
there.
FIGURE
31.5 Our starting point for creating newsletters
The Newsletter template in Figure 31.5 is quite sparse, to be frank,
making it suitable for newsletters that might take radically different
forms each month. For a more structured publication, the template could
be quite specific, with many fill-in-the-blank elements already in place.
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| TIP You can also save a
template by issuing a conventional File Ø
Save As command, changing the file type to CDT, choosing the location,
and saving the file. When you do this, the contents automatically
get saved as part of the template.
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