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| Mastering CorelDRAW 9 |
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Chapter 34
Your Very Own Interface
Featuring
| • CorelDRAW’s control room | 826 |
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| • Flying tools | 830 |
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| • You say tomato... | 834 |
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| • Building your own interface | 839 |
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| • Menu mania | 845 |
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| • The keys to happiness | 849 |
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| • Managing workspaces | 850 |
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This chapter won’t teach you about any new special effects or drawing commands, and it won’t show you how to wrap text around a graphic or create a parallel extrusion. In fact, the last chapter of this rather large book does not contain any tips and tricks at all, at least in the conventional sense. We’ll even go so far as to suggest that if you are satisfied with the way DRAW presents itself to you and with the overall design of the interface, you can skip this chapter and start reading the Index, line for line.
But if you want to customize DRAW to make it more efficient for what you do, you’ll want to read every word of this chapter. Corel has given DRAW 9 an interface that is almost completely customizable, and it takes center stage here.
This chapter includes step-by-step instructions, and we start with the basics. But the ramp is short and steep, because we presume that most of you who want to customize the interface are already familiar with it in the first place.
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Tool Terminology 101 This chapter will be easier to digest if you start by learning a few terms. Microsoft’s definition of a tool is very specific, and Corel has done its best to comply. DRAW has always had a toolbox (the one on the left of the work area), and all of the icons on it (Pick, Shape, Zoom, and so on) are referred to as tools. But what used to be known as the Ribbon Bar is now called the Standard toolbar—although you’ll discover in this chapter that there is nothing standard about it. Also at your command are the property bar and various other toolbars—including ones that you can make up to suit yourself. Flyouts emanate from the nine toolbox icons that have a small triangle in the lower-right corner. When you click and hold on one of these tools, several additional icons “fly out” from there. Flyouts can be separated from the toolbox and floated on the screen like toolbars, and as of DRAW 9, they too can be customized. The status bar is still the status bar; ditto for the color palette, the rulers, and the scroll bars. To best understand the starting point for customizing DRAW, you should try to keep the following straight in your mind:
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CorelDRAW’s Control Room
Before we begin any conversation at all about customization, you need to understand the architecture that supports this. We wish that Corel were more clear about the relationship between designing the interface and the place where those design changes are kept; we’ll clarify it here.
Corel calls this reservoir of interface design a workspace, and its job is to store and make available for future recall all of its elements: the size of the CorelDRAW application window...the status of dockers and toolbars (floating or docked)...the folders last used for opening, saving, importing, and exporting work...the value of such items as Nudge, Duplicate, and Constrain Angle...all the way down to when and where to make backup copies of drawings. Finally—and the topic central to this chapter—a workspace tracks any changes you make to the interface from the Customization tools. Figure 34.1 shows the tree structure in Options of all of the elements within the Workspace heading, and we have expanded Customize.
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FIGURE
34.1 All of the elements under the jurisdiction
of Workspace
It looks perfectly logical here in the dialog, but in practice, there is little that is intuitive about this, especially when you think back through recent versions to all the disparate ways these settings have been stored and recalled.
Workspace is one of three organizational constructs designed to house DRAW’s settings. They are described as follows, in the order in which they appear in Options:
- Workspace identifies a collection of settings and conditions
that creates the environment (the interface) in which you work. These
settings do not change from one drawing to the next.
- Document identifies those settings that do potentially change from one drawing to the next. In this grouping are elements such as whether to show the page border, the color of guidelines, and the status of the snaps, styles, and HTML settings.
- Global settings are on the other side of the spectrum—they are outside of the reach of Document or Workspace settings. So such controls as color correction, preflight controls for printers, and file extensions recognized by DRAW are as sticky as they come: change them once and they will not change again unless you do it.
- Document identifies those settings that do potentially change from one drawing to the next. In this grouping are elements such as whether to show the page border, the color of guidelines, and the status of the snaps, styles, and HTML settings.
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