English Storybook prepress production: CorelDraw meets PageMaker

English Storybook prepress production: CorelDraw meets PageMaker

 

PageMaker is Adobe's cross-platform professional page design software. In the field of graphic design, PageMaker has become the preferred software for professionals and has been widely praised. But PageMaker, compared with some other typesetting software, only provides simple graphics, which is a pity for PageMaker, which has a strong ability to form versions. Especially when it comes to pages with a lot of auxiliary graphics, PageMaker is pretty useless.

 

CorelDraw, produced by Corel Corporation, is a world-class plane vector drawing software, which is widely used by professional designers. Its integrated environment provides advanced means and the most convenient tools for graphic design. In particular, its powerful graphics rendering ability is sought after by designers. CorelDraw has its own powerful typesetting capabilities, especially in advertising typesetting, but if you want to make CorelDraw take on the task of multi-page text typesetting, I'm afraid it's not as good as PageMaker.

 

Since both PageMaker and CorelDraw have their strengths and weaknesses, why not combine both to make the software complementary to each other? Let's take the header and footer processing in book typesetting as an example to explain how to make CorelDraw and PageMaker perfect.

 

First, PageMaker needs

In the layout of the page, especially in the lining of some books, in order to beautify the layout, often add graphics and some reading navigation text to the header or footer of the page.

 

If these graphics are limited to basic graphics such as straight lines, simple rectangles, circles, etc., PageMaker can make them on its own, but if they are a little more complex, such as gradient fill, complex curves, etc., PageMaker will probably stop at nothing!

 

What to do in such a situation?

Second, use CorelDraw to meet

In practical applications, it is generally carried out in two ways:

One way is to hand over all pages and footers in PageMaker to CorelDraw. According to PageMaker's page needs, CorelDraw sets the page size and the top, bottom, left and right margins, completes the header and footer, and leaves the middle document empty. Export the entire page together directly for PageMaker to use. The advantage of this is that the overall layout of the page can be viewed in advance in CorelDraw and can be adjusted reasonably. The downside is also obvious. When you make a change or tweak in PageMaker, you have to do it all over again in CorelDraw, which makes the change inconvenient. Also, the page and margin Settings in CorelDraw need to be fairly accurate, otherwise, when you put it in PageMaker, it will be wrong.

 

The second way is to only give CorelDraw the graphs that cannot be made in PageMaker. For example, there are two complicated graphs, and after completing them in CorelDraw, each graph is exported as a separate file for PageMaker to select and set according to its needs. This is more flexible, and many of the objects PageMaker can handle, such as text and straight lines, are better printed by PageMaker than by CorelDraw.

 

Here, you can integrate the above two ways, first set its page size and margins in CorelDraw, complete the header and footer, and view the overall layout of the page in advance. After meeting our requirements, select the graph you want to make in CorelDraw (here, we'd better enlarge the graph), then select the "Export" menu item under the "File" menu, and the "Export" dialog box will pop up.

In the file name text box, enter the file name to be exported. In the Save Type drop-down list, select WMF-Windows metafile. Select Only Selected. Click the "Export" button after setting.

 

3. Application in PageMaker

After exporting the WMF file in CorelDraw, PageMaker is ready to apply.

Open the file you want to typeset (already set the page size and margins) and click the Home icon to go to the home page.

 

Select the Import menu item on the File menu and select the WMF file you just exported in CorelDraw in the dialog box that pops up.

Resize and position it, and the rest of the text, lines, etc., is done directly with the appropriate tools in PageMaker.

 

After drawing the graphics that need to be made with PageMaker, and entering the required other text information, such as page numbers, etc., the header and footer design is completed.

 

4. Attention

(1) Other graphics in PageMaker can still be made by CorelDraw, and when exported, we can also export to various formats, such as JPG, GIF, BMP, etc.

 

(2) In order to make the printed graphics better, the graphics in CorelDraw should be exported in a larger proportion than the actual size, and PageMaker can reduce it after import.

 

(3) Since PageMaker is still imported as a "picture link", the resulting graphics must be in the same directory as the PageMaker file.