Talking about the patchwork technology of CorelDRA

On CorelDRAW's typography technology

when it comes to the scope of prepress production, we have to mention the typesetting of books or magazines. Because of the standardization and industry standardization of books and magazines, this method has certain technicality and enforceability. At present, most of the printing plants are still in the way of manual typesetting for books and magazines, but with the gradual promotion of electronic digital typesetting technology, computer typesetting will replace manual typesetting. For the selection of computer typesetting software, at present, most domestic producers choose PageMaker, Beida founder and some graphics software such as CorelDRAW, illustrator, freehand, etc. some foreign-funded enterprises are teaching and introducing some more advanced and scientific professional typesetting software, such as QuarkXPress, to mainland producers. Here, in addition to PageMaker, QuarkXPress and other typesetting software, I choose CorelDRAW, a large-scale professional software that combines graphics and typesetting, which is currently the most widely used in China, to make some simple typesetting introductions

coreldraw is a professional drawing software, and it is also a very powerful typesetting software. At present, there are almost no projects that it cannot do in any book or publication that can be seen in the market. The vast number of graphic designers and prepress producers in China all have a necessary understanding and mastery of them, and together with another image processing software Photoshop, they constitute a necessary tool for graphic designers to take up their posts

1. Layout arrangement

coreldraw's working environment adopts the default page layout of an internationally widely used A4 office paper, which is oriented to the office rather than aiming at the layout of books and magazines lower than 4% of full carbon materials. Therefore, when we use CorelDRAW for the typesetting of books and magazines, we must make some settings for this layout. Of course, we can also completely ignore the existence of this paper, Another better way to deal with the working environment setting we want is to use some rectangular boxes to visually represent the actual paper requirements we want

the method introduced in this article is not based on the typesetting method required by CorelDRAW software itself, but based on my personal experience in prepress work. The purpose is to throw bricks and jade to some producers engaged in prepress work, and open up another typesetting road for readers. Therefore, if there are readers who are skeptical about the typesetting method of this article, there is no need to have some unnecessary suspicion. Instead, they can find a more suitable typesetting method according to the method introduced in this article, combined with their practical experience in practical work. Naturally, the typesetting method introduced in this article is believed to be more suitable for beginners who are just engaged in prepress work

for readers who are preparing to refer to this article and use CorelDRAW for book and magazine typesetting, this article has no technical premise, and only requires readers to call up CorelDRAW program from the windows start program menu

coreldraw opens a new desktop window similar to word and other office software, except for some menu items and tools

select the text tool of the toolbox, click the mouse at any place in the working window and drag in a certain direction, and a rectangular box will be drawn in the window. There is a mark that can change the size of this box in the lower right corner or right below this box. Press and hold here with the mouse and drag in a certain direction to change the horizontal or vertical size of this box, Here we set this box to 170mm x 257mm (assuming that the size of the finished product is A4 paper and the four peripheral distances are 2cm respectively)

click the left mouse button in this box to input text

in a normal book or magazine, it is impossible to only have some simple symbols such as words. We will also insert some pictures and other objects according to the needs of different article contents or layouts. In CorelDRAW, you can not only insert foreign pictures processed by other software, but also create some pictures by using its own powerful drawing function. No matter what form the pictures are introduced, we should embed them into the text

the work of inserting pictures into text is very simple. Just select the pictures to be inserted and set them in the text circle of the paragraph affected by factors such as the sharp decline of new energy vehicle subsidies on the format toolbar. In this tool, CorelDRAW provides us with rich text wrapping functions, which can wrap pictures left or right, up or down, or four sides, and so on

when inserting pictures into the text, CorelDRAW's good prepress automation function has preset the standard splicing specification of pictures and texts for us. Of course, we can also make some customized settings according to our own preferences or layout needs to make the embedding of pictures and texts more beautiful or reasonable

if the text and picture contents of the required books or magazines are all input, we need to put the arranged contents into the paper to print or enlarge the printing plate on the printing machine. This step is also very simple. We just need to select all the arranged contents containing objects such as pictures, and then use the alignment tool to align this content to the center of the paper, or to any place on the paper. This method is applicable to the default page format of the software to arrange multi page continuous versions

the above-mentioned typesetting according to the default method of CorelDRAW means that only one page of the layout content in the finished page number is placed on a page. If you want to continue to arrange the contents of the next page in the same document, you need to add a new page number to place it

in addition to aligning the arranged graphic content with the default paper center of CorelDRAW as mentioned above, you can also draw a rectangular box that is consistent with the actual paper size as a virtual page, so that you can put more page content on a page. If you put it according to the printed sheet, the research team can put 16 or 32 page content on a page after a lot of experiments, without adding a new page number

when making page layout, we will use a lot of objects such as headers and footers. There are good items to automatically arrange headers and footers in general typesetting software, but this function is not included in CorelDRAW, but we can manually place them through the powerful graphics and layout functions of this software. In this regard, CorelDRAW is slightly less than PageMaker, QuarkXPress and other software, but this does not mean that CorelDRAW cannot do this. On the contrary, sometimes it may have a more beautiful effect than it

if you want to arrange the header and footer items on the page, you can first make the header and footer in the blank space next to it, and then arrange the header and footer to any position we want through the functions of copy, paste, arrangement and alignment

2. Precautions during typesetting

other layout settings in Book typesetting are basically similar to office software such as word and Jinshan office, such as paragraph, word and line spacing, font size change, cutting and copying, movement, alignment, first word sinking, tab Tables (you can make any complex form of report in CorelDRAW, but you can't automatically calculate or generate charts like professional tabulation software such as Excel), etc. Basically, all these operations can be realized by calling the corresponding function items in the text menu in the menu bar

after typesetting, if the text is placed according to the default page format of CorelDRAW, page numbers, binding lines and other layout items can be automatically generated in the print items, and the page number order can be changed at will; If virtual pages are used on the same page number (that is, large rectangular boxes such as paper are drawn to replace the default actual paper of CorelDRAW) to arrange the graphic content, some page numbers and other items need to be manually adjusted. Some people may think that manual adjustment is not suitable for book typesetting with multiple pages. In fact, this is an unnecessary consideration: first, ordinary printing houses rarely receive thick books for printing, while professional printing houses mainly print books, and the typesetting software used is basically beidafang genuine software. Compared with widely circulated magazines or similar publicity albums, the page number is mostly only between one and two hundred pages; Second, we can use CorelDRAW's powerful copy and paste functions to achieve; Because the copy and paste function of CorelDRAW is comparable to that of few software. Although this stupid method is indeed too complex for hundreds of pages of books, it also brings us a more free page arrangement form. Using this method, we can easily arrange the page numbers wherever we want without worrying about the wrong position

most people who are used to PageMaker, Peking University Founder, QuarkXPress and other typesetting software think that using CorelDRAW to typeset is too slow. In fact, this is completely a problem of not arranging the number of pages in a file. Compared with the above software, CorelDRAW is a little inconvenient for the operation speed of files with more than 50 or 60 pages, but in fact, it is very troublesome for post plate makers to arrange dozens or even hundreds of pages in one file at the same time. In order to make a printed version, they still have to pull out these pages and rearrange them. For the printed matter with too many page numbers, we don't need to arrange all the page documents in one document. We can adjust the number of pages in the document according to the actual situation during printing. For example, if the maximum printing page of the printing machine can only print 16 page numbers, then we can arrange 16 page documents into one document, which not only speeds up the speed of document operation, but also makes it convenient to make a large version to make a plate. In this way, A 300 page book only needs to be made into about 20 documents. Although at first glance, it seems that there are too many documents, which is not as convenient as a document such as PageMaker, for plate makers, a document is just the number of pages of a standard printed version, and many plate makers also like to use CorelDRAW to spell the large version. If this grammar is adopted, a document is a version, It is very convenient to operate

many typesetters believe that CorelDRAW does not have the convenience of PageMaker when arranging graphics, which is also the result of poor understanding of CorelDRAW. In CorelDRAW, the graphics of pictures are only better than CorelDRAW, We can not only arrange the patterns in the form of links like PageMaker (it looks clearer and more eye-catching than in PageMaker. If we want to achieve this clear effect with PageMaker, the speed advantage of PageMaker will disappear), but also import all the patterns into the file. Whether to adopt links when importing patterns can be selected in the dialog box when importing patterns

in professional typesetting software such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress, there is a function of binding several documents into one document. This is a pity in CorelDRAW that it does not bring convenience to our typesetting work. along with it