Starting and opening drawings
CorelDRAW lets you start a new drawing from a blank page, from a template, or from an existing drawing. A blank page gives you the freedom to specify every aspect of a drawing. A template provides you with a starting point and leaves the amount of customization up to you.For more information about creating and using templates, see “Working with templates.” Basing a new drawing on an existing drawing lets you reuse objects and page settings. CorelDRAW lets you open existing drawings saved to the CorelDRAW (CDR) format as well as drawings and projects saved to various file formats such as Corel DESIGNER (DSF or DES), Adobe Illustrator (AI), Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), and Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM). However, you may not be able to open certain files, depending on their file type and contents. In such cases, you can try importing the files as objects in an open drawing. For information about the file formats you can import in CorelDRAW, see “Supported file formats.”
If the drawing you are opening is from an earlier version of CorelDRAW and contains text in a language different from the language of your operating system, you can choose code page settings to ensure that text is properly converted according to the Unicode Standard. Code page settings help you correctly display text outside the drawing window, such as keywords, file names, and text entries in the Object manager and Object data manager dockers. To display text correctly in the drawing window, you need to use encoding settings. For more information, see “Encoding text.”
If the drawing you are opening contains an embedded International Color Consortium (ICC) profile, you can extract and save the profile. You can also preserve a drawing’s layers and pages.
If you are using Windows Vista, you can search for drawings by different criteria, such as filename, text within the file, and other properties attached to the file. For more information about searching for files on Windows Vista, see the Windows Vista Help. You can also display previous versions of a drawing.
To start CorelDRAW |  |
To start a drawing | |
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Do the following
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Start a drawing from a blank page
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Do one of the following:
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Start a drawing from a template
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Click File
 New from template, choose a template, and click Open. |
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When you start a drawing from a blank page, the drawing is based on the default CorelDRAW template.
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You can specify different page layout settings. For more information, see “Specifying the page layout.”
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To open a drawing | |
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You can also
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Enable the Extract embedded ICC profile check box.
This option is not available for all file formats.
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Maintain layers and pages when you open files
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Enable the Maintain layers and pages check box.
If you disable the check box, all layers are combined in a single layer.
This option is not available for all file formats.
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View thumbnail of a drawing
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(Windows Vista) Click the arrow button next to the Views button, and click Extra Large Icons, Large Icons, Medium Icons, or Small Icons.
(Windows XP) Do one of the following:
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Choose a code page
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(Windows Vista) Choose a code page from the Select code page list box. This option is not available for all file formats.
(Windows XP) Choose a code page from the Code page list box.
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Search for a drawing (Windows Vista)
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Type a word or phrase in the search box.
The search box looks for files only in the current folder and subfolders. To search for a drawing in another location, you must first navigate to the folder where the drawing is stored.
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Access a previous version of a file (Windows Vista)
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Do one of the following:
You can access a previous version of a file only if System Protection is turned on.
For detailed information about accessing previous versions of files, see the Windows Vista Help.
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on the toolbar.