I am looking for a solution to read current Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop files into Coreldraw2024. Then I need to export these layered files to an old version of Corel Draw running on Windows 2000. I need suggestions for the Corel versions to buy. My printer is a 24 year old ALPS 5000. I need to spot print each layer seperately to the ALPS. I can acquire whatever versions of Corel are needed for this solution to work. I could also use Windows XP, but the drivers are cluged and complicated. Windows 2000 is native to the printer. I hope somebody can give me a suggestion.
Last year I spoke with a guy at a show who figured it out. And he was using Adobe from maybe a few years back .. but fairly recent. Plus two versions of Corel. The trick being which versions. He was running my same ALPS 5000 printer from cluged Windows XP drivers. Native drivers are Windows NT and Windows 2000. Made for business not home use. Sadly I lost his info, but he was printing thermal resin decals for coffee cups with his solution. Simple Adobe drawings with solid colors imported somehow to Corel. All printing is done with 100% black artwork, spot printed by selecting cartridges one per layer of artwork. This gives me white, metallic silver, metallic gold and even brushed aluminum printing. High quality scale model railroad decals made the same way. Drawing is crude with those old tools, hence the desire to use something more modern to generate the artwork. And really tough to hire it out unless it can start out more modern. Wish I had not lost track of him. He knew something about all the versions and features that allows this jumping of the lilly pads!
Simple drawings may work CorelDRAW to Adobe but transparency, complex fills and smooth shades are impossible. For cross application editing.
Same thing for the effects from Draw 2019 and newer and older versions of Draw itself.
If the artwork elements have a basic appearance then they can be saved down to "legacy" CS6 format AI files in Illustrator. Current versions of CorelDRAW tend to be able to open those kinds of files without much trouble. Within CorelDRAW new CDR files can be saved down-ward to earlier file version formats. In the year 2000 I think CorelDRAW was in the version 9 or version 10 period.
Excellent Bobby. These are the details I needed. I appreciate your reply !! We will give this a shot.