Corel Corel Designer Technical Suite - 12 Reviewer’s Guide

Reviewer’s Guide

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Contents

Introducing Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 ...........5

A walkthrough of Corel DESIGNER

Technical Suite 12 ...........................8

What’s in the suite? .........................13

reviewer’s guide

The complete technical graphics solution .....................5

Precision, flexibility, and ease of use ........................6

New and enhanced features overview .......................7

Main applications .................................13

Supporting application and utilities .......................13

Documentation ..................................14

System requirements ...............................14

New and enhanced features: a closer look.............15

Upgrading from Corel DESIGNER 10 ................22

Upgrading from Corel DESIGNER 9 (Micrografx)..........23

Glossary................................24

Corel corporate profile .......................26

reviewer’s guide

Introducing Corel DESIGNER® Technical Suite 12

Corel DESIGNER® Technical Suite 12 is a comprehensive and complete technical graphics suite, offering one of the most competitive price/performance ratios in the industry today. Designed to meet the needs of value conscious customers in the technical graphics segment, no other technical graphics suite available today can match its breadth of high-end benefits and functionality at an affordable price. Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 meets the immediate and long-term needs of organizations who need to create technical documents faster and with greater precision, while reducing their overall cost of ownership.

The complete technical graphics solution

In one complete package, Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 provides powerful applications and compelling new features that enhance the design experience. Corel DESIGNER 12 offers the new projected drawing modes which dramatically speed the design process. The new suite also includes Corel PHOTO-PAINT® 12 — a complete image-editing application for retouching and enhancing photos.

To help repurpose legacy drawings, the suite includes CorelTRACE® 12, a bitmap-to-vector tracing utility that converts scanned or manually created bitmaps into editable vector images. Corel CAPTURE™ 12, an advanced screen capture utility, is also included to help capture images. Rounding out the suite is Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications, which provides application customization and extensibility for both Corel DESIGNER and Corel PHOTO-PAINT.

reviewer’s guide

Precision, flexibility, and ease of use

The outstanding features of Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 were developed specifically for the workflow of the technical illustrator, with many additional creative features, and exceptional ease of use. The new projected drawing modes dramatically increase productivity by letting the technical illustrator actively draw on the projected plane, which eliminates the need to draw the object first and then project it in a second step. The Callout tools provide numerous options for identifying objects in a drawing. Technical illustrators can choose from several text styles and a variety of line segment endings, including arrowheads and other symbols.

Precision is paramount in technical illustration. Accurate placement of objects on the drawing page and in relation to other objects is imperative. To that end, Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 provides an array of tools and features that ensure precision. For example, features such as gravity snapping and dynamic guides help technical illustrators draw and place objects accurately, reducing creation time.

To facilitate collaboration, Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite supports more than 75 file formats, including DXF, DWG, SVG, CGM, CDR, PDF, PSD, TIFF, AI, EPS, DOC, and XLS. The import and export options ensure that technical illustrators can share their work and repurpose legacy designs. The suite provides flexibility in the form of creative tools and extensive text formatting capabilities. Moreover, Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 includes Corel PHOTO-PAINT for editing photos. It also includes content specific to technical illustration, such as hatch fills, vector fills, raster fills, more than 4,000 industry-standard symbols, Clipart, linear patterns, and more.

reviewer’s guide

New and enhanced features overview

Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 offers technical illustrators the following new and enhanced features.

New projected drawing modes: The new drawing profiles let users project objects onto drawing planes and create the illusion of a three-dimensional graphic.

Enhanced gravity snapping: Gravity snapping lets users snap the pointer to various points in objects, making it easy to create and position objects accurately.

Enhanced dynamic guides: Dynamic guides are temporary guidelines users can pull from the following snap points in objects — center, node, quadrant, and text baseline.

New B-Spline tool: The B-Spline tool lets users draw curved lines by setting control points that shape the curve without breaking it into segments.

New dimension lines: Corel DESIGNER introduces three new types of dimension lines — segment, radial, and diameter dimension lines.

New enhanced line styles: Enhanced line styles are especially useful for illustrating stitch patterns and drawing parallel lines.

New hatch fills: Hatch fills consist of hatch patterns that are composed of vector-based lines and are used for representing different types of materials in a drawing.

New Fillet/Chamfer/Scallop: Technical illustrators can now use scallops, fillets, and chamfers to shape objects.

Enhanced transformations docker: The improved Transformations docker lets users project and unproject objects with precision.

Enhanced Eyedropper tool: The enhanced Eyedropper tool lets users copy color, object properties, effects, and transformations from one object to another.

New Workspace Selector: To help users quickly improve productivity, Corel DESIGNER offers additional workspaces.

New Dynamic language switching: Users can install multiple language packs to enable use of the application in more than one language.

Enhanced Unicode support: Exchange files effortlessly by ensuring that text is displayed correctly, regardless of the language or operating system in which the file was created.

New double-byte formatting: Users can now apply Asian fonts to Asian and Latin text by using the property bar.

New Insert formatting codes docker: The new Insert formatting codes docker lets users easily insert special characters and spaces, such as em dashes, en dashes, and nonbreaking spaces.

New Hotspotting — Object Data Manager: Users can manage a complex project by assigning data to its objects.

reviewer’s guide

New Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) support: Import and export to files of CGM Version 4 profiles, such as ACGM (ActiveCGM), WebCGM, and GREX (ATA GREXCHANGE).

Enhanced Corel DESIGNER® (DSF): Support for files saved in Corel DESIGNER 9 and earlier

versions has been improved. Hatch fills and enhanced line styles are now preserved.

New Export for Office: This new feature lets users optimize drawings for exporting to Microsoft Office or WordPerfect Office.

New AutoCAD® Data Interchange Format (DXF) and AutoCAD® Drawing Database (DWG): AutoCAD 2004 files are supported.

Enhanced Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): Users can now choose a variety of new options

when exporting a drawing to the SVG file format.

Enhanced Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF): Users can now publish a drawing to a

PDF file that is compatible with Adobe Acrobat 6.0.

Enhanced Adobe® Photoshop® (PSD): Support for duotone images and layer preservation have been added.

New Corel PHOTO-PAINT® 12: Take advantage of this complete image-editing application that lets users retouch and enhance photos as well as create original graphics.

New CorelCAPTURE™ 12: This application lets users capture onscreen images.

A walkthrough of Corel DESIGNER® Technical Suite 12

Corel DESIGNER® Technical Suite 12 was conceived with a specific focus on the technical illustrator’s needs for design precision, collaboration efficiency and flexibility, and the ability to repurpose old data and drawings.

Geared for the technical illustrator’s workflow

The creation of technical illustrations can be a complex process, especially when designs are intended to serve multiple departments within an organization. The diagram for a single part may need to be used in product documentation and repurposed for use in marketing materials. In such cases, it is critical that users are able to collaborate with internal and external department resources and work seamlessly with external data in various file formats.

reviewer’s guide

Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 integrates with the workflow of technical illustrators.

reviewer’s guide

Customizing the workspace

Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 was designed to integrate with the workflow of technical illustrators. It offers a customizable user interface, enabling technical illustrators to streamline the available tools to match their workflow and quickly tailor the interface menus, commands, shortcut keys, and toolbars. For network deployments, Dynamic Language Switching makes it easy to deploy and use the application in any of its supported languages.

Also included is the Workspace Selector which provides the choice of additional workspaces. The Workspace Selector includes preconfigured workspaces that resemble the look and feel of Adobe® Illustrator®, Micrografx Designer® 9, and Microsoft® Visio®. In addition, users can create, save, and share their own custom workspaces. For example, users can create different workspaces that are specific to the review and design processes.

Converting legacy designs

Before the days of CAD and other illustration software, technical illustrators relied on old-fashioned India ink to put their designs on paper. To use many of these older designs today, they must be scanned to create a bitmap image. The bitmaps are then traced to form editable vector images. To save time and effort, Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite 12 includes CorelTRACE 12, a bitmap-to-vector tracing utility. CorelTRACE automatically converts scanned or manually created bitmaps into vector images and seemlessly imports them into Corel DESIGNER.

CorelTRACE: converting a bitmap image (left) to a vector image (right).

Minimizing data loss through AutoCAD® compatibility

Today, most technical illustrations start with data created by CAD engineers. Typically, this data details the technical component of a product and can range from legacy designs to new perspective views. Often, a technical illustrator employs multiple applications before finishing a design. The ability to exchange this information between applications without losing data is critical to a technical illustrator’s workflow.

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