So someone at Corel had a good idea and is touting a Font Designer. So lets counter with ideas of our own, things that we would find really useful. After all we are the people that are using the suite to earn a living, so we ought to know right?
There are some things Draw just cant do, some very basic things that people ask about when they are a newbie and we have to tell them, 'well this is the workround' because it cant be done in a straight forward way. And what I am referring to are closed shapes (that can therefore be filled) that have one or more planes of symmetry. Think heart shapes, ovals (not ellipses, ovals), teardrops, stars (yes I know about the star shapes, but try editing one and keeping it symmetrical!).
These are really basic shapes that have hundreds of variants each that need a way to create, fill and keep them editable. It cannot be done. Period. We all find our own workrounds, I personally draw one half of the shape up against a guideline then clone it and flip the clone. Problem is you can'f fill it until you use Smart Fill, which doesn't work half the time, and is a one shot solution. Edit the master curve half and you have to do it again.
The solution can be approached two ways. We either keep existing curve tools as they are and make Smart Fill smarter rather than the dumb tool it is now. We make it tolerate gaps, take account of, outline widths, and make it dynamic so that it is associated with the bounding curves and updates as they move.
Or we introduce special nodes that can have a plane of symmetry applied to them, rather like ' Reflect Nodes' but 1000% better*. Reflect nodes needs to be part of this solution too since it needs to allow for nodes that are not on the axis of symmetry moving in concert to mantain the symmetry of the object. See attached heart image. We would also need a node with a defineable axis of symmtery, as shown in the second image
Either way a proper solution gets the core drawing tools improved so that objects such as the filled heartshape are simple to draw and edit.
* Reflect Nodes is another one of those 'good ideas' that never got finished. If you use it on a MAster & Clone it breaks the relationship. You cannot use reflect nodes on nodes of a single object, so a filled object such as the above, is an impossibility.
I'll keep them coming, but I'd like to think others will have a say too.
Corel Devs. Go and find an old working 386, with NT4 or WIndows 3.1/95 on it and install v5 . In it you will find an application called Corel Mosaic. It was an asset management application like Adobe Bridge. It worked. I was able to print pages of file thumbnails and browse all my files with ease. When it was discontinued I had to go looking elsewhere for an application to manage all the CDR files I have created over the years. I ended up at ThumbsPlus. It is a very useful programme but not without its faults, not the least of which is the way it produces thumbnails of CDR files, there are better ways. I also own a copy of STT Thumbs, which is an object lesson in how simple it is to get thumbnails of files from ANY CorelDraw file with very little overhead, and none of the mind-numbing hassle of the Shell Extension.
Any long term user of Draw will accumulate files. Even if they do not get reused (mine do often) a record of what you did, how you solved design problems, a chance to create a portfolio to show a client is an absolute necessity for a designer wishing to create a track record of success. File management of graphic files where you cannot get a proper preview in Explorer is impossible, and Explorer will not show thumbnails for many many file formats, and prior to X4 (IIRC) even Draw thumbnails were very low res indeed.
What is needed is an application the brings together the best of the likes of STT, Mystic Thumbs, ThumbsPlus to create a visual approach to file catalgoeing/viewing. The technology exists within Corel. STT Thumbs used a Corel App included with every version of the suite for the last 15 years or more, CdrConv.exe, to generate high res images of CDR files. It even produces quality thumbnails of CMX files something even the Shell Ext cannot do. CPT also. PSD.PDF,DOC, XLS, Multipage CDR, no problem.
SO WHY DOES Corel not do this????? Asset management is important. Corel have a long legacy of supporting many many file formats so they have the expertise,
I will argue this functionality is way more important than the niche field of font creation.
I personally draw one half of the shape up against a guideline then clone it and flip the clone. Problem is you can'f fill it until you use Smart Fill, which doesn't work half the time, and is a one shot solution.
First, let me say improving/revamping the reflect feature would be an incredibly welcome change!
My preferred method is to move the reflected object off the page and create a Boundary and move that Boundary object back onto the page. The boundary object can be immediately filled.
But you can also (after moving a copy off the page) select the reflected object, Combine, then select the adjacent start nodes using the Shape Tool and join those two nodes, then the same on the end nodes. That object can now be filled.
The screen shot has two objects, the red version I did the combine/join nodes process on, the green one is the boundary method.