and for accessing an instance (a duplicate that takes up less saved file space in a document) of it tomorrow: 1. With an object selected, choose Edit | Symbol | New Symbol. 2. In the Create New Symbol box, type a name you’ll remember later in the Name field and then click OK. As you create more and more new files using CorelDRAW, you’ll definitely want to stay tidy in your cataloguing work. Cross-referencing is a good practice; in Figure 13-7, the Name of the symbol refers to the typeface it was copied from. Later, it’s easy to look up the name of the symbol and use it in a program outside of CorelDRAW. 394 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 13-7 Define a symbol and then save it to a Symbol Library. Export Library Symbol only in current document Symbol available all the time Drag into the document 3. Open the Symbol Manager and then click on the Symbol1 title. A thumbnail of the symbol you just saved appears. 4. A tiny Export icon becomes active; click it, it’s the Export Library command. This is not much of a library, but you need to start somewhere! 5. In the Export Library box, it’s best to save the new library to where CorelDRAW recommends (to better allow the program to locate it in the future; Symbols is a good location). Name the library and then click Save. You’re done. 6. In any new document, open the Symbol Manager, click the User Symbols + icon to open the collection, and then click the name of the library you saved in step 5. Now all you need to do is drag the thumbnail into a document, and you have an instance of the symbol you saved. In Windows 7, if you install CorelDRAW X5 Graphics Suite to the default hard disk location, your saved Symbol Library should be in your boot drive directory (usually C:\)AppData\Roaming\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5\Symbols. This is good to know when you want to load your collection by clicking Add Library on the Symbol Manager docker, to add symbols to a Local document. With the Pick tool, right-click over any object you create, and you can then choose Symbol | New Symbol and Symbol | Symbol Manager from the context menu. Symbols saved to a library are always instances and as such, duplicates you add to a document cannot be edited using the Shape tool or other shape-editing features. You can apply transformations such as scaling and rotating, but you cannot edit the nodes of a shape instance. However, you can edit the original shape as saved in the Library, and all future instances you use reflect your edits. To edit a symbol in your library, right-click the shape thumbnail in the Symbol Manager and then choose Edit. After you’ve edited the shape, right-click the shape in the document window, and then click the Finish Editing Object button to the left of the document horizontal scroll bar. Every instance in every document is updated to reflect your edits. It’s easy to tell the difference between an instanced symbol and one that can be edited in any document. Choose the shape using the Pick tool. If the bounding box dots are blue, it’s a shape instance. If the bounding box handles are black, it’s a regular shape and you can perform any CorelDRAW operation on the shape. Font Etiquette: Using Fonts with Style and Appropriateness It’s easy for anyone to mistype a word or use fractured grammar in an email message. However, an ad posted on the Web and a sign hanging in a store window for thousands to see is not a use of “relaxed” typography between friends—and it’s hard to retract. A badly CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 395 13 designed sign from a typographic point of view hurts the product, the company, and your reputation as a professional. The following sections discuss common mistakes we try to avoid from the planning stage of a printed message; you’ll work with CorelDRAW’s type features in future chapters, but now it’s time to learn to walk before you learn to fly with new talents and skills. Font Appropriateness and Very Basic Layout Rules When an audience looks at a printed message, they don’t simply absorb what the message says, but they additionally look at the presentation: the choice of capitalization, emphasis through bold and italic family members, how lines of text are stacked (justification), point size, font color, and how well the printed message harmonizes with any accompanying graphic. With most digital typefaces, the artist casts a tone on the typed message. Headline, sans serif Gothic fonts, for example, are rather hard-edged and cold yet impactful, while Roman serif fonts tend to lull the audience with rounded strokes, swooping serifs, and swashes. Roman typefaces generally send a warm but clean and professional signal to the viewer, while Gothic fonts wake up the reader, perhaps even warning them—hence their appropriateness as a headline typeface. Figure 13-8 has two obvious sight gags demonstrating inappropriate uses of specific fonts. At left, the use of all uppercase, Gothic stencil contrasts extremely distastefully with both the message and the graphic behind it. At right, the choice of fonts on the page the officer is showing to someone about to be detained clashes with the message to the extent that the officer will probably have a hard time getting the cuffs on the person rolling on the pavement laughing. A quick fix to these two bad examples would be to swap the fonts around, so the stencil font is used in the Miranda rights, and the slightly silly typeface is used for “I Love You.” But better still, a quick trip to Font Navigator and the CorelDRAW Fonts CD will show you that Staccato 222BT (its industry name is Mistral) is warm, loose, and splendid for a valentine, and the font that commonly goes by the name Machine (distributed by ITC among other vendors) is serious, functional, and perfect for the arresting officer. You have the choices of fonts at hand; all you need to do is apply your artistic sensibilities to the selection. When you have more than one line of text in a headline, legibility is a concern, and this, too, is accomplished by an appropriate choice of fonts. You want a “quick read” from the audience, especially on billboards and vehicle signage that appears and disappears as the sign or the reader moves. Let’s take a simple example headline, pull it apart, examine it, and make it work hard for your money. “The best deals in town” is a common slogan. In Figure 13-9 you can see this headline cast in text three different ways, with icons beneath them to indicate their merit as a sales message. 396 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 397 13 FIGURE 13-8 Don’t undercut your message with the wrong font. FIGURE 13-9 From clownish to professional, your message stands or falls based on fonts and layout. First, the sign above the clown suffers from the following abuses of typographic conventions and rules: ● The use of Times New Roman, a Roman serif font, is stale (it’s a Windows default typeface used since 1991 on the PC) and artistically defeats the message. It’s large yet the characters aren’t bold enough to present an impactful message. ● The use of all capital characters looks particularly inappropriate; Roman typefaces have upper- and lowercase characters, and the message looks like the designer had the CAPS LOCK key enabled. Also, it’s plain bad form to “shout” a message unless a typeface has no lowercase letters and the designer is firm about the choice of fonts. ● The use of several exclamation marks suggests that if the business owner shouts loudly enough, someone will buy the product. One exclamation mark is sufficient for stressing a message; often a headline is adequately emphasized with no exclamation at all. It is redundant to cast a headline in all caps followed by several exclamation marks. ● The use of quotes is for quotations, not for emphasizing a phrase. When a designer puts quotation marks around “BEST” in this example, it creates in the reader’s mind the suggestion that the retailer is speaking euphemistically. For example, when someone writes, “Get that ‘antique’ out of my parking lot in 15 minutes,” they aren’t actually referring to your 10-year-old car as a valuable antique, but rather as a piece of junk to which they’re referring euphemistically or sarcastically. The word “BEST” in quotes will surely be interpreted by anyone with writing skills as, “They really aren’t the best deals; they mean something else.” ● The alignment of the headline is wrong. Although left justification is acceptable for Western language countries, the second line is much shorter than the third line. As a result, the reader has a hard time focusing to quickly read the message. The center example in Figure 13-9 is a vast improvement and gets a checkmark because it’s acceptable as a headline. Here’s what is going right for this treatment of the slogan: ● The use of sans serif Gothic fonts makes the headline easier to read quickly. ● The emphasis created by using a bold, italic font to stress “BEST” makes it the first word a casual passerby will read. What this design does is create a hierarchy of importance within the message. It directs the reader to the most important, then to the second most important area of the slogan. ● The slogan uses center justification and the lines are stacked to align well; no line is too long or short, and both legibility and neatness have been added. 398 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide The middle example is short of ideal for two reasons: ● Because “BEST” is italicized, it might be design overkill to also make it all capitals and bolder. ● The exclamation mark at the end is not really necessary. The message’s importance is already well supported by the use of the fonts. Generally, if you’ve graphically punctuated a slogan, you don’t need to add an exclamation mark to overdo the importance of the slogan. The example at right, which earns four stars, works the best for the slogan. Here’s why: ● The lines of text have been stretched to fit, by using the Pick tool and scaling horizontally, disproportionately. You can do this with CorelDRAW artistic text. The result is a very neatly stacked presentation of words. ● The word “BEST” stands out through the use of a different color. In design, you don’t necessarily have to use black to emphasize something, not when text surrounding a particular word is set in black. Contrast can be achieved through emphasis, or by “negative emphasis”; when objects surrounding the most important one are gray, you make the most important object black. And conversely, a gray object gets noticed when surrounded by black objects. Additionally, uppercase for “THE” and “BEST” works in this example because the other words are upper- and lowercase. In art, you first learn the rules, and then when you understand them well enough, you can break the rules with style. ● The hierarchy of importance of the words is proper and reads well. “BEST” is read first, then the surrounding text, and then “in town”—because a thin typeface is used, a script type font, it becomes subordinate in visual importance. It’s not hard to think up a more compelling and fresh sales slogan than “The Best deals in town.” Once you have that ideal slogan, consider the good and bad points in the previous example, approach your sales message with taste and sensitivity, lean but don’t push, and you cannot go wrong. You’ve seen in this chapter how to define a font, how to find a font, how to find and save an individual character, and how to put the whole of your acquired knowledge into motion with some good working rules for the ambitious sign-maker. There’s a lot more in store in the following chapters on working with text. It’s not just about signs: you’ll see how to work with the Text tool to its fullest potential, creating extraordinary logos and headline treatments, and then work your way up to outstanding page layouts and special design needs such as reverse printing, flawless character alignment, special effects, and more. You’ve read enough text in this chapter; let’s move on and actually work with text! CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 399 13 This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 14 Getting Your Words Perfect 401 Y ou want your text to look as good as your drawings, and the good news is that the same powerful grammar and spelling tools offered in Corel WordPerfect Office suite are right inside CorelDRAW. Proofing tools including a spell-checking system, thesaurus, and grammar checker—in 25 different languages—are at your fingertips. This means you don’t have to duck out to your word processor just to proof text that you’ve entered on-the-fly in a CorelDRAW document. CorelDRAW also has the same QuickCorrect feature that’s in WordPerfect for correcting common typos and spelling mistakes as you type. With QuickCorrect, you can also automatically replace something you’ve typed with something else—which is extremely helpful for words that you commonly mistype and for common extended characters such as © or ™. Both CorelDRAW and WordPerfect use the same writing tools, dictionaries, word lists, and configurations. If you add a word to your user word list in WordPerfect, it is there for you in CorelDRAW. Therefore, when you know how to use the writing tools in WordPerfect, you already know how to use them in CorelDRAW and vice versa. If you’re a Microsoft Word user, CorelDRAW’s proofing tools are as easy to learn as WordPerfect’s—the dialogs and labels are a little different in appearance, but you’ll soon get the idea. This chapter takes you through the steps and options you have to step up to the title of Literary Wizard in addition to CorelDRAW Design Guru. Using CorelDRAW’s Writing Tools Frequently, small to medium businesses communicate with customers around the world; with text proofing in 25 different languages available right out of the box, CorelDRAW makes it easy for you to get your sales language proofed perfectly regardless of whether you minored in French at school. When you install CorelDRAW, choose the languages you are most likely to use (you can go back at any time and install more), and you are ready to check the spelling and grammar of anything that comes your way. By default, CorelDRAW assigns a language code and checks all text using the proofing tools that correspond to the language your operating system uses. For example, if you use a U.S. English copy of Windows, CorelDRAW automatically installs English–U.S. proofing tools and assigns all text to U.S. English (ENU). Assigning Language Codes If your document contains text in a language other than the default language, you need to select the foreign language text and assign the proper language code to the text so CorelDRAW will use the appropriate proofing tools. The language currently assigned to selected text is noted by a three-letter code in parentheses next to the font description in the status bar, as shown, for example, by “(ENU)” here. 402 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Ill 14-1 To change the language assignment of any character, word, or paragraph of artistic or paragraph text in a document, select the text and then choose Text | Writing Tools | Language. When the Text Language dialog opens, you can choose any one of the 122 different language and language variants that appear in the list. Click OK to make the selection. Why Language Codes Are Important You want your text to be spelled correctly, including accent and other orthographic marks (text indicators of how a word is pronounced), regardless of what language you use. When text is tagged with the proper language codes and you’ve installed the corresponding proofing tools, it’s as easy to check foreign language text as it is to check your native language text. For example, suppose you’re working on a package design that contains text in English, French, and Spanish on a system that uses U.S. English. To proof in multiple languages, you select each piece of French text and assign it a French language tag, select each piece of Spanish text and assign that text a Spanish language tag, and so on. CorelDRAW has already assigned the English language tag, so you don’t have to do that. Now when checking the document for spelling and grammar, CorelDRAW will use English, French, and Spanish proofing tools (if you installed them) to check the text for foreign language spelling errors. CHAPTER 14: Getting Your Words Perfect 403 14 . Later, it’s easy to look up the name of the symbol and use it in a program outside of CorelDRAW. 394 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 13-7 Define a symbol and then save it to a Symbol Library. Export. library, right-click the shape thumbnail in the Symbol Manager and then choose Edit. After you’ve edited the shape, right-click the shape in the document window, and then click the Finish Editing. three-letter code in parentheses next to the font description in the status bar, as shown, for example, by “(ENU)” here. 402 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Ill 14-1 To change the language assignment