and off static text like “My First Website 101.” Now that you know how to make, save, and change movie frames, you have weeks if not years to experiment with new ideas and different animation objects of your own. And you can save an animation to AVI and QuickTime in addition to GIF file format—you can choose these from the Save As Type drop-down list when you choose File | Save and Save As. AVI and QuickTime files are a lot larger to save to disk, but the animation quality is also much, much better, because these animation file types are not limited to 256 maximum unique colors. Chapter 27 moves from the screen to the printed page. Come learn how to ensure the best possible render to a home printer and a commercial printer with CorelDRAW’s features. 844 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide PART IX Thinking Outside of the (Tool) Box This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 27 Printing: Professional Output 847 P rint is not dead! It’s alive and well, thank you, in almost every enterprise, and outputting your work so your clients can hold it in their hands is just as much an art as designing a piece in CorelDRAW. This chapter takes you through professional output—CorelDRAW’s features that extend beyond the now-familiar File | Print command—and what it takes from CorelDRAW and you to make every dot of ink on a page look exactly like every pixel you designed on the screen. CorelDRAW’s print engine is organized into several well-defined and easy to understand areas for setting printer hardware parameters, previewing your print selection, and using various other options to enhance your finished printed work. In this chapter, you’ll learn to set options from beginner to advanced levels in these areas. Printing a Document to a Personal Printer Let’s suppose that you want to print a “one off,” perhaps to show to your boss or coworkers as a proof of concept, or for personal pleasure, or to see if everything is arranged on the page correctly before packing off a copy to a commercial press. If your artwork is black and white (you used no color, but only shades of black in the design), you’ll probably print to a laser printer. Laser printers don’t really have any color-critical settings, so you’re probably as ready to go as you’d be if you were printing a text document. If you’re printing to an inkjet, most of today’s inkjet circuitry does an automatic conversion from RGB color space and the color ink space (usually CMYK, although many affordable printers use six inks), and again, you really don’t have to jump through any hoops if you’ve designed a document that uses RGB, LAB, or CMYK color spaces to define the colors you filled objects with. Here’s a tutorial that covers the basics for outputting your work to a personal printer. Before you begin, make sure on the Object Manager docker that the layers you want to print are visible and that printing is enabled for the layers; a tiny red international “no” appears on layer properties that are disabled—you click the “no” symbol to enable the layer property. Printing Single- and Multiple-Page Documents 1. Open the document you want to print, and then choose File | Print (CTRL+P), or click the Print button on the standard toolbar. Any of these actions opens the Print dialog, shown next. Pay attention to the orientation of the page with respect to the orientation of the paper as it will print. The Page drop-down offers to match the orientation of the page, or to use the printer default orientation settings. Changing the orientation doesn’t change your document, but only the way it prints. 848 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Ill 27-1 2. In the General tab, choose your printer from the Printer drop-down menu, and then click Preferences to set any printer properties such as the print material page size, orientation, and so on. Keep in mind that any special features specific to your printer might override any CorelDRAW-specific features, in particular, color management (discussed later in this chapter). In general, it’s not a good idea to have a color management feature enabled on your printer when CorelDRAW color manages the document. Two color-management systems will contend with each other, and what you see onscreen will not be what you get in your print. 3. Click the Quick Preview button to expand the dialog to show a preview window if you’d like to check the document for position on the printable page. A dashed line appears in the preview window, indicating document areas that are close to or that go over the printable page margin. If you see this, you might want to cancel the print operation and rework your page. Alternatively, you can click the Layout tab and then check Fit To Page, although doing this scales the objects in your document (so forget about the CD label you want to print fitting perfectly on a physical CD). 4. If you have more than one document open in CorelDRAW, you can choose which document to print by clicking the Documents radio button in the Print Range area; make certain that all documents you want to print have the same portrait or landscape orientation before printing, or you’re inviting a headache. In a multi-page CorelDRAW document, choose the page(s) you want to print from the Print Range area, and then enter the print quantity in the Number Of Copies box. See the following Tip. CHAPTER 27: Printing: Professional Output 849 27 Quick Preview button Quick Preview 5. Before you click Print, check to see whether any issues are on the Issues tab. If the tab reads “No Issues,” proceed to step 6 and collect $200. However, if there’s an issue, you should address it (or them) first. Issues come in two varieties: showstoppers, indicated by a triangular traffic sign with an exclamation mark, and trivial stuff, indicated by an info (i) icon. A common example of trivial stuff is printing blank pages; the Issues tab will inform you, and you can easily correct this by changing the Pages value in the Print Range area of the General tab. Showstoppers require careful reading of the explanation provided on the Issues tab; the remarks and explanations are quite clear—such as attempting to print a low-resolution image to a high- resolution printer. Your best bet is to cancel the print and to read the rest of this chapter…and save paper and ink. Here’s what the issues icons look like: Ill 27-2 6. Click Print, go get your favorite refreshment, wait a moment, and then get your print. To print contiguous (consecutive) pages of a document, in the Print Range area’s Pages box, enter the page numbers separated by a hyphen (for example, type 6-8 to print pages 6, 7, and 8). To print noncontiguous pages, for example, pages 6, 8, and 16, type commas between specific page numbers: 6, 8, 16 in this example. You can also combine these two conventions to print both contiguous and noncontiguous pages by separating each entry by a comma. For example, entering 6-8, 10-13, 16 will print pages 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 16. The Quick Preview deserves a little more coverage here. After clicking the Quick Preview button, you’re shown a preview window and page-browsing controls (see Figure 27-1). While you’re previewing, a right-click offers invaluable commands from the pop-up menu to Show Image, Preview Color, Preview Separations, and to toggle the view of rulers. When you want to print a multi-page CorelDRAW file, you can quickly turn pages in Quick Preview to make sure you’re printing within page boundaries and that all the pages contain what you want to print. To print the preview page at the current settings, choose Print This Sheet Now from the pop-up menu. 850 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Life is good; click Print. Minor inconvenience; check Print Range. Possible showstopper; read the info, and then consider canceling the print. Setting Print Options The tabbed areas of the Print dialog more or less follow from left to right a progression from personal printing options to more ambitious endeavors such as printing separations for process color composite (commercial) printing. Some of the areas on the tabs are device dependent and appear only after CorelDRAW evaluates your printer’s capabilities; Use PPD (PostScript Printer Description), for example, is dimmed on the General tab until you’ve chosen a printer that is PostScript capable. This is why selecting your printing device must be your first step in printing from CorelDRAW. Depending on the printer defined, you’ll see tabbed areas for General, Layout, Separations, Prepress, PostScript, Misc, and Issues. Setting General Options The General tab of the Print dialog, shown in Figure 27-2, offers control over some of the most common printing options. CHAPTER 27: Printing: Professional Output 851 27 FIGURE 27-1 Use the buttons on the bottom of the dialog to more easily choose what pages you’d like to print. To start of document Backward one Forward one Right-click pop-up menu To end of document Page selector Here’s a description of what each option in the General tab controls: ● Destination This area represents the feedback provided by the printer driver used for your selected printer showing the Printer name, Status, Location (local port, or on a network), and Comment information. Direct, network, or spooler printers are indicated according to their connection status. If CorelDRAW cannot find a printer connected directly or remotely (through a network) to your computer, you’ll need to pay a visit to the Windows Start menu | Devices and Printers, and then choose to Add A Printer. The good news is that this is a wizard-style process and that Windows ships with just about every conceivable print driver for popular makes and models. You might be prompted for a specific print driver, so it’s a good idea to have the manufacturer’s disk handy or to download the latest drivers from their website. Clicking the Preferences button provides control over printer-specific properties and output material sizes. Choosing Use PPD lets you assign a PostScript Printer Description file; checking this box displays the Open PPD dialog, where you locate and then select an appropriate PPD file. Unless you’re already familiar with what Print To File does, don’t check this box in your everyday printing; see “Saving a Print File” later in this chapter. ● Print Range This area contains options to select pages from the file you have maximized in the drawing window—or from any document you have open in CorelDRAW; it can be minimized, and you can print it as long as it’s open. Choose Current Page to print the page currently in view in your CorelDRAW document, or enter specific page numbers in the Pages box. If you go into the Print command with one or more objects selected in your document, the Selection option becomes 852 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 27-2 Use the General tab of the Print dialog to set the most basic printing options. available, so you can print only your selection; this is quite handy for printing only a part of your document without rearranging or hiding objects, or for changing your document before printing. If you have more than one document open, choosing the Documents option displays a list of the open documents, so you can choose which document to print. Choose Even and/or Odd from the drop-down menu to print only certain pages. By default, both Even and Odd pages are printed. ● Copies This area has two options for setting the Number Of Copies to print either collated or not. When Collate is chosen, a picture appears indicating the effect of collating. Collating is a great timesaver when you want to publish a multi-page presentation and don’t need the hassle of reordering pages as they come out of the printer. Using Print Styles Print styles remove the repetitive task of setting up the same (or similar) printing parameters by letting you choose to save all the selected options in the Print dialog in one tidy print style file. If your printing options have already been saved as a style, open the Print Style drop-down menu on the General tab of the Print dialog, and choose the style from the list. To create a style that includes all the settings you have currently selected, follow these steps: 1. On the General tab, click Save As to open the Save Settings As dialog, shown here. As you can see, this dialog includes a Settings To Include tree directory listing the categorized print options and check boxes according to current settings. Ill 27-3 CHAPTER 27: Printing: Professional Output 853 27 . the best possible render to a home printer and a commercial printer with CorelDRAW s features. 844 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide PART IX Thinking Outside of the (Tool) Box This page intentionally. designing a piece in CorelDRAW. This chapter takes you through professional output CorelDRAW s features that extend beyond the now-familiar File | Print command—and what it takes from CorelDRAW and. you’re shown a preview window and page-browsing controls (see Figure 2 7-1 ). While you’re previewing, a right-click offers invaluable commands from the pop-up menu to Show Image, Preview Color,