I will start from series of articles about the process of making a layout which will be ready for smart processing via VBA macros and reliable for professional print.
This is my first blog post for the CorelDRAW community...so I hope to pass the test and please forgive me for my spelling errors - I am still learning English :)
I would like to highlight that I will present you my own view how to do this task. You may have of course your habits and techniques. In any case, knowledge about other alternative techniques will surely not hurt you ;)
Let's assume that we're talking about a multipaged publication destined for offset print.
Let's go!
Based on that information you will start to prepare demo templates for review and consulting with your client.
Most of my graphics design projects (see the latest one) are focused more on graphics and images than the text. As product catalogues, they consist of several repeatable templates - easy to manage with VBA macros any time when content should be automatically changed. So a good prepared template, on which your project will be built is a base for easy managing of the content later.
My recommendation is to quickly prepare several pages with possible versions of the layout within one document at start. You should think about possible limitations for the area destined for text content and position and size of images to be used in it. This information will be useful for - you or the other person responsible for preparing images or text for the project.
Make sure the way you are going will be accepted by your client.
While editing that sample templates consider to often generate jpeg files for each page and send via e-mail for a review.
You may do it very quickly useing my Layouter.quickExportJPG macro. Learn more at http://www.krasbit.com/en/products/layouter/help/11-the-export-quick-export-jpg-tab
When the templates on which the project will be built are approved by your client, it is time to adjust them to be more friendly for managing by user, VBA macros and final print.
a) Set the desired paper width and height regarding client needs and guidelines provided to you by the printing house.
b) Use the Guides layer to include there 3 rectangles which will help you to mark bounding boxes for the final crop area, necessary bleed and margins. It will also help you to snap applicable content of your content to this borders. You must only remember to keep this layer unprintable.
Make active the Guides layer then doubleclick rectangle tool to create a rectangle matching to paper width and height. Use this rectangle to get preview about the edges of cutting after printing. Duplicate this rectangle twice. Increase size of first copy to about + 5mm for width and height (+ 2,5 mm per each side). Use it for marking the bleed area. To the borders of this rectangle you should snap any objects you are keeping near the border of your project. By example if you use a blue coloured shape as a background for whole or part of the page, you should increase its size and snap it to appointed bleed. Otherwise, when you leave size of this shape exactly matching border of page - you will get undesired appearance at the borders of your page after printing and cutting your project. Decrease the size of second copy of rectangle to about 10 mm per width and height (5mm for each side). Treat borders of this rectangle as a margin that you should not exceed with text and any other significant shapes. When you finish, lock this layer to avoid accidental selecting of these rectangles.
c) Use multiple layers and the Object Manager (menu: Window->Docker->Object Manager).
This may seem obvious, but I know designers who store all of the content on a single layer and have not used the Object Manager yet!Use the bottom page layer for storing page background, the layer above for images, and above ones for custom vector elements or texts. Name your layers and be consequent while organizing your content. For example set "bcg" layer for store background assets, and for example "photos", "vectors", "txt" to above layers respectively to store images / photos, vector artworks and text.
Create a subdirectory destined for storing templates and create a template files (.cdr or .cdt) from each of pages with accepted layouts.
To export the single page content as a .cdr with retaining all layers within template - marque select on the whole page and use Save As command with ticking Selected only. Use any kind of convention while naming these files. You will import these single paged templates later while assembling the project.
Use File -> New
Give the name to your fresh project, save it and follow the same steps as before in step 3.1 a) and 3.1. b)
Do not create any additional layers now. They will be created automatically if you use my techniques described later. Now you are ready to:
Do not use in this case the built in CorelDRAW command New From Template since it is IMHO useful only for single paged projects.
Do not use in this case Import command to import your template, because when you import any .cdr / .cdt file using this command you will get your content grouped into one object on the stage after import. Your carefully developed structure and the pleasantly named layers prepared in the original template will be ignored and you will get instead just a group. I think that you do not want to ungroup it and manually create again and move appropriate objects to theirs appropriate layers. Am I right?
If you want to import your template and get original structure of layers and objects - use Krasbit Layouter insert page from template macro. Once you had set the source file (or changed it using change template file macro) you may add a new page, and import template with one command!
In the next article I will describe in more details how to prepare templates to be ready for smart managing using other of VBA macros and how this affects the management of content while assembling the project later..
See you in next week!