From the June Mastering CorelDRAW newsletter Amazing Text Features Daniel Will-Harris Text handling. Sounds kind of touchy-feely, doesn’t it? Well, it is and it isn’t, depending on how you use it. Sometimes the less touchy-feely, the faster and more productive you can be - and the more design variations you can try in less time. To get the most out of text handling, you’re going to need to master two of Draw 4’s new features: styles and linked text boxes. When I was creating the templates that ship with Draw 4, I had to start designing them in 3. While it was possible to create documents with a lot of text in 3, you obviously were limited to a single page per file and your text all had to be in separate blocks that didn’t flow when you edited them - in other words, long text handling was possible, but not probable. But Draw 4 really changes all that and makes it possible to create multi-page publications - even text-heavy newsletters - with relative ease, as long as you take advantage of styles and linked text boxes. Relative is the key word here, because Draw’s long text handling still has some basic limitations and rough edges. Style Power Styles are nothing new; word processors and page layout programs have had them for years. But it always surprises me how few people actually take advantage of them. Just in case you’re not familiar with the concept of styles, here it is in a nutshell: Paragraph text styles contain all the formatting specs for type, things like typeface, size, fill and outline color, leading, paragraph spacing, justification, tabs, indents, bullets and hyphenation. Artistic text styles are the same, with the exception of tabs, indents, bullets, and hyphenation, as well as the addition of some effects, like perspective. (There are also Graphics styles, applicable to drawn objects.) The power of styles is two-fold, (or three fold, if you’re doing a flyer). First, styles help you format your pages quickly; you don’t have to set text attributes manually for each paragraph - just select a style and apply it. You can apply styles to individual paragraphs, or entire Paragraph text blocks. Second, styles help make your text more consistent - you won’t accidentally have one paragraph of body text in a different typeface or size, or with different leading. Styles ensure that you maintain consistency in your type specs, and that makes your pages cleaner and more professional. It also helps when you’re working with color to ensure that you are only using the colors you specifically wanted in the piece. Third, (I guess we’re onto the three-fold here...) styles allow you to make major changes or corrections in seconds (or minutes on slower machines). Without styles the same tasks can take you hours. Fourth, (aha, a surprise) styles actually give you more creative freedom. How’s that possible? Because styles are the perfect "what if" tool - they let you change the formatting of all your body text or headings in one swell foop. So you spend less time formatting, and more time trying out variations and finding the one that works best. There’s an added bonus, too. If you change typefaces or sizes directly, using the Text roll-up or the Edit Text dialog box, bolds, italics and other attributes go right out the old window (I don’t know if it’s supposed to work this way or whether it just does, but it doesn’t much matter). However, if you change the face or size using styles, the other attributes are left intact. So styles are much more efficient in every way. Nothing’s Perfect Now, I’ve got to be perfectly honest: Draw 4’s text handling isn’t perfect. First, it still has pretty crude justification - you can’t add letterspacing and you can’t control space size. Next, while styles are powerful, they can also be powerful slow. Updating a style on a four- page document can take several minutes, even on a ‘486. And there are two things even more serious: Unstyled text can be very dangerous when you update the Default Paragraph text style because the text will update using the new default attributes and change your layout unexpectedly. It’s not a pretty sight. Another problem: Undo! Undo doesn’t always undo all style changes - you may find that after an undo your text isn’t formatted exactly as it was. Most serious of all: Don’t use the "Default" styles. Default styles are always overwritten by the settings in the current CORELDRW.CDT (the file that holds defaults between sessions.) This doesn’t make much sense to me, but this is how the program is designed to work. Because of this, it’s imperative that you create your own Paragraph and Artistic styles, because if you use the default ones you’ll have to update them manually each time you open a file, and this means nothing but wasted time and unexpected changes. My own templates are designed using the default styles, because this feature was changed late after the templates were completed. This means you must update the default styles each time you open the templates. Linked Text Boxes Linking provides a way to flow text through more than one Paragraph text frame. While not covered much in the manual, this feature is essential to handling long blocks of text. You connect text boxes by clicking on the empty little box at the bottom of a text frame and either dragging to draw a new text frame, or clicking inside an existing text frame. Once linked, there’ll be a + sign in the bottom of the text frame you’re linking from and one in the top of the frame you’re linking to. If the existing one has text, that text will be placed at the end of the linked text flow. When you import text using File Import, a new text frame is always created, and if the text file is large then additional frames and pages are created and automatically linked. Once linked, the only way to break the link is to delete the text box. Deleting the box doesn’t delete the text, just the box. If you delete a box that is linked on the top and bottom, the link will remain from the box above it to the box below it. When you edit text in a linked box, the outlines of all the text boxes in the link will be displayed. The more text you have linked, the longer it will take to make editing changes. You can select text in several boxes at once by placing the cursor at the top of the first linked box and dragging it to the end of the last box. You’ll then see all the text highlighted. You can even link into and out of enveloped Paragraph text boxes (what a segue!). Enveloped Text - Inside and Around Text inside an irregular shape: You can place text inside any shape, not just those that are listed in the Add Preset list (choose Envelope Roll-Up from the Effects menu to display this.) If you’re working with a block of text that isn’t square, choosing something like a circle will give you an oval. Rather than trying to make the text block the right shape, create the shape you want and use Create From. You’ll find that Create From is actually the fastest way to get exactly the shape and size you want. Text around any shape: If you want to wrap text around another object, click on the Paragraph text you want to wrap and select Add New from the Envelope roll-up. An envelope box will appear the same size as the frame, and you can use the standard node-editing tools to change its shape and create a wrap. You’re really putting text inside this irregular object in order to wrap it. It’s not fast, it’s not easy, but it works. Big Warning: Text inside an irregular path has one gigantic, silly, inconvenient drawback: Enveloped text can’t be edited directly on- screen. You’ve got to use the Edit Text dialog box, and if you’ve used that lately, you know it will only display one paragraph at a time. The result: There’s absolutely no way to combine two paragraphs once you’ve enveloped except to clear the envelope, edit the text, then create the envelope again. This is a real pain - so the best route is to always create an object from which to Copy From. You can set the outline and fill to None so it won’t print, and you can then use this ‘pattern’ to recreate the envelope if you have to remove it for text editing. It takes no longer to work this way, and it can save a lot of time. Long Text Tips: If you’re bringing text in from another program and you want bold, italic and other attributes to be saved, import the text by choosing Import from the File menu. Cutting to the Clipboard from some word processing programs loses attributes and adds unnecessary returns. However, if you’re using Word for Windows, you can also choose Paste Special from the Edit menu and select Rich Text Format to paste while maintaining text attributes. Strangely, Draw itself does not support RTF: When you cut and paste text in Draw, you lose all formatting. Speed Tip: Choose Special from the Preferences menu and click on the Display button to set the greeking value. The larger the number you set, the more text that will be greeked, and the more text that’s greeked, the faster you can work on the main layout (but obviously not the text). So there you have it - many different ways to make text handling faster and easier. Daniel Will-Harris, designer and editor, is the author of Dr. Daniel’s Windows Diet: A Fast Cure for your Slow Windows Pains. He also hosts a series of instructional videos on Corel Draw and other Windows programs. He may be reached via CompuServe at 73257,2606, via MCI Mail at DWILL-HARRIS, or at Box 1235, Point Reyes, CA 94956. Tip: Finding fonts with Mosaic If you want to know what fonts are used in a Draw 4 file, all you have to do is run Mosaic. Click on the thumbnail of the file, then choose Get Info from the Edit menu. The box on the bottom will list the fonts used in the file. Two caveats: This only works on .CDR files, not CDTs; and DRAW 4 has the regrettable habit of including the Default style fonts in this list, even if they aren’t actually used in the file. Contents Copyright Kazak Communications, 1993. Subscription Information While the regular subscription rate is $75 per year (in US dollars for Americans, Canadian dollars for Canadians), charter subscriptions to the 20-page monthly Mastering CorelDRAW newsletter are available for a limited time at $60 (add $30 U.S. for overseas). 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