Corel Draw

I’m at a small sign shop now with a Corel Draw workflow…20 years in illustrator and I feel like a baby with it…It’s just clunky still…but we do super large format that illustrator can’t handle, so …

Hate to break it to ya, but I use Illustrator for superwide format all the time. And InDesign.
In fact, we just installed a 40’ mural created in Illustrator.

Corel is fine too, once you get up to speed. It’s just not well-accepted as a hand-off software. Since you are your own printer, that’s not an issue to you. I have one outsource vendor that refuses files in Corel. It throws too many wrenches into their work flow (very niche sub-specialty product - they can afford to set their own rules.LOL.)

I haven’t used CorelDraw for anything beyond experimenting with it, so I can’t comment on it’s clunkiness (although I’ve heard that term mentioned more than once).

Have you tried Affinity Designer? In my opinion, clunkiness is a term that doesn’t apply, and it doesn’t have the size restrictions of Illustrator. You can specify dimensions in feet or meters without the workaround of building things at smaller sizes and scaling up on final output.

You’re also good at math, aren’t you? :wink:

Math?
Sometimes.
Yes it was in scale.
1:10. Scaling math doesn’t get easier than that. LOL. And because it was a mural, it was about 35ppi at actual size (350ppi in scale.) The image was a montage made in Photoslop so overall image resolution wasn’t an issue, and linked into Illustrator. 480" x 120" = 48" x 12" Output 1000%. Illustrator can handle up to about 600-800mb images before it starts taking a dive. Yes, it will crash and burn if placed stuff is much over a gig. But then you have to wonder why you are placing a gig’s worth of image in Illustrator…

As for infinite scaling, admittedly haven’t tried Affinity designer, but a lot of workflows are based on a PDF system at some point along the way, and those are still limited in size to under 200 inches. Next time I’m able to have lunch with one of my cohorts in crime that actually uses the rip software (I don’t, I’m front end loader) I’ll ask them about that.

If those of us here in the U.S. actually used metric measurements, like every other country, I’d totally agree. When my tape measure says, for example, 21 feet 8 and 5/16ths inches, the simplicity of decimal ratios is lost. I’m just curious, how do you deal with this?

Convert everything to inches and just move the decimal point.
21’- 8.3125" is 260.3125 = 26.03125 which in Illustrator is 26.0313"
When it comes to murals, anything within a half inch of real is good. Printing and putting those up is not an exact science. You get stretch or shrink as the media goes through the machine that you have to compensate for on site. And I’ve often found that on a wall, across the floor might be 21’- 8.3125" but across the top at the ceiling could be as much as 2" out of square depending on the age of the building or the quality of the carpentry. I always allow for 4-6" of bleed all around (more on a long run) unless I take the measurements myself.

I do have CADTools for Illustrator that actually works in whatever scale conversion you want. You type in your number and it does the scaling.

Quite honestly though, I’d much rather be doing large stuff in InDesign. The control is so much better than either Illy or Corel there is just no comparison. But there is no handy scale tool for InD.

Hey guys sorry for the disappearing act, been busy this year, believe it or not! I am reviving this thread because I need to see if ya’ll have ever encountered this and know how to fix. We are using Corel 2018 and its my understanding that I should be able to view thumbnails in the object manager in the same way you see thumbs in the illustrator layers pallette. Except I can’t …on every layer all I can see is the generic curve. Text shows as text, bitmaps say bitmaps. But on a 10,000 layered file this can be maddening. Anyone ever had this issue?

NVM…Just found out Corel didn’t have previews in my version. (2018). Boo hiss.