Using Your
Templates
When youre ready to use the styles and objects stored in a template,
you have two choices: choose a template when you begin a new drawing or
load a template during work in a drawing. Well look at both methods
here.
Creating a New Drawing from a Template
This is the route to take if you intend to begin a project with a template
that includes contents. To do this, go to File Ø
Open, select CDT as the file type, and navigate to the subdirectory where
you saved the template. Double-click it, and a small dialog appears.
Since you want to create a document based on the template, be sure New
from Template is selected. Check or uncheck With Contents, then OK the
dialog. DRAW places the entire template on your page. This remains an
untitled drawingDRAW uses the generic Graphic 1and you can
save and name as you wish. You dont have to worry about altering
the contents of the template or any existing file.
If you choose Open for Editing in the Open Template dialog, the template
file will be opened like any other DRAW file. Changes you make will be
saved to the template and will be incorporated into future documents you
create based on that template.
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| NOTE DRAW did us no favors
with the naming of its template functions. Raise your hands, how many
of you went to File Ø New from
Template, expecting to be able to load a .cdt file?
No, this command starts the Template Wizard, letting you select from
nearly 500 PaperDirect templates stored on CorelDRAW CD No. 1. The
Wizard does its job nicely, but it should have been called something
else, because it doesnt allow you to load your own templates
without jumping through enormous hoops. If you really want to jump
through those hoops, click the Wizards Help button, then the
How To button in the upper-right corner of the Help window. This will
open a set of instructions for running the TempWiz script to add templates
to the Wizard.
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Loading Templates
To load a template after youve started a document, select Template
Ø Load from the Styles docker context
menu. The With Contents option is not available when you load a template
this wayits as if you are importing the template into an existing
drawing, so adding contents would probably be unwelcome.
Loading a new template this way will swap out all of the old styles for
new ones, but it will not change the formatting of existing objects in
your drawing. Whether this is good or bad news depends upon your point
of view. It would be very powerful if you could load a new template and
instantly change the formatting of objects that had the same style name
as one in the newly loaded template.
And it would also be dangerous. Corel played it conservatively here,
and we think thats wise. Save that functionality for Ventura. Instead,
when you swap in a new template to an existing drawing, all objects keep
their formatting but are all reassigned to the default styles. Newly created
objects take on the formats of the new defaults.
Succeeding with Styles
and Templates
DRAWs styles can be enormously powerful when used to help you reach
your productivity potential, so ask yourself some questions about your
work: Do you regularly need to assign 2-point outlines with round caps?
Create a style for them. How about a custom Calligraphic Pen? Create a
style. You can have all of these styles immediately accessible every time
you start the program. Just park them right in coreldrw.cdt.
To summarize, here are some important points to remember as you gain
skill in the use of styles and templates:
- Keep the default styles simple. They wont
be of much help if they give all objects a texture fill and a thick
outline, or if they put all artistic text in 400 point Crazy Creatures.
Save the fancy formatting in new, separate styles.
- All styles that you create are stored in
the .cdr file itself. By saving styles in a template,
you make it easier for new projects to use the same styles.
- Install the AvantGarde BT and Common Bullets
typefaces. Many of DRAWs templates and sample files expect to
find these two typefaces. Although you can use the PANOSE font substitution
utility to make your own substitution, we have found that even ardently
anti-TrueType users have capitulated and installed these two faces,
just to make life easier.
The Color Styles Idea
Color Styles were an entirely new feature in DRAW 7 that promised to
speed the work of artists who produce the same designs in a variety of
color schemes, or who are sometimes confronted by last-minute color changes.
These handy color styles can be created as you work, either manually or
with assistance from DRAW. Additionally, DRAW can create color styles
from a finished drawing or object.
Graphic and text styles are an excellent aid to maintaining consistency.
They enable you to change any shared attribute (such as fill, outline,
font, or spacing) incorporated in the style. This includes, of course,
fill and outline colors.
Now consider a different situation: your client wants an image of a hot
red sports car, a drawing that will use several shades of a basic color,
red. This design calls for realism, so you, the skilled artist, will be
using several shades of the basic color for areas of shadow and highlight,
based on the direction and intensity of light on the subject.
You painstakingly finish the drawing and your client admires your work.
He shows real appreciation for your rendering skill...nods approvingly...and
then decides he wants the car in green.
In the era of hand-drawn artwork, you would have had to redraw the image
from scratch. In past versions of DRAW, you would at least have had to
select each object in the drawing and apply a new color to ita tedious
and time-consuming task. In either case, there was little you could do
in advance to reduce the workload, even if you had foreseen the problem.
DRAWs Color Styles feature offers ways to automate this work. The
color change can be virtually instantaneous if you prepare for this situation
in advance, and can be accomplished quickly even if you are caught by
surprise.
If you used a color style to relate your shadow and highlight colors
to their basic hue, you can simply turn to the Color Styles docker. Find
your basic color, called a parent color, and change it to the new
color, perhaps with a bit of experimentation. All the related colors,
called child colors, change accordingly, and youre done.
If you didnt set your drawing up with color styles, DRAW can create
them automatically. Youll probably have to make some adjustments,
but the task should still go quickly.
The next day you tell your client you were up half the night, and the
new art is ready. The client is most appreciative of your dedication,
and pays you a handsome fee for the late changewhich actually took
you all of 10 minutes.
Creating
Color Styles Manually
The key to advance preparation for the color change scenario is to create
your shadow and highlight colors as members of a color style family,
in which all color variations share the hue of a single parent color.
It doesnt matter whether you prefer to work by filling objects
as you create them, or by creating all the objects of a drawing first
and then going back to fill them. Either way, begin to create a color
style by giving a suitable object a uniform fill of your base
color, for parts of the drawing that are neither shadow nor highlight.
This will be the parent color for the color style.
We will use a brick building as our example of how to go about coloring
a drawing using color styles. If you want to follow along, you can download
Brick Building.cdr from the companion page on the Sybex
Web site.
- 1. The outline is already done, so select the large
section of wall at the left end, whose color will be typical. Apply
the fill color you want, using the on-screen palette or the Uniform
Fill dialog.
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