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If you were following along in the previous lesson, we started a tour of our new welcome
screen, and we now know it's set up like a booklet,
and one of the tabs we can access is the What's New tab,
and that's where we're going to go in this lesson to talk about the new and enhanced
features of CorelDRAW X4. As we move through the movies in this title,
we'll be using some of those new or enhanced features.
So, let's click What's New right now. You might be thinking, hey, I closed up my
welcome screen, I went to the top right corner and clicked the close button, how do I get
that back? Well, here in draw you will notice there is
a button here on the Toolbar that we'll be talking
about when we tour the user interface and as I hover over it, you can see it says, Welcome
screen. I can always go back to the welcome screen
at any time by clicking this button, even if the welcome screen doesn't launch
by default every time I launch CorelDRAW, and now we're going to go over the What's
New tab. Now under What's New, you can see those three
sections Layout and text editing, Design assets and Workflow.
Each of these has a description down below of some of the content in those sections,
so I can go directly to a section, Layout and text editing or I can click this
little navigation button down here. This button is pointing to the right, because
I'm on the first page of the section, and when I click on it, it will take me to
Layout and text editing. The path shows up here across the top.
Now I have got two buttons in my navigation area, if I want to go back, I could do that,
and go directly to Layout and text editing by clicking it here on the right half of my
page. So here you can see that this section called
Layout and text editing has one, two, three, four, five,
six new or enhanced features, like Independent layers.
As I click on these, I get a quick description of each as it expands, so under Independent
layers, now you can see that we can set up Independent
layers on our various pages in a document. Meaning, we can setup for example, guidelines
for individual pages. So, they are different on each of those pages,
but setup guidelines on a master that will stretch throughout the entire the
document. You've got both options now, there is also
the ability to create tables. New interactive tables, and this is great
for trying to organize text, and graphics together for example, and you
want things to line up properly. You can put them in a table, and if you ever
done any Web design, you know that, that's a great way to layout a Web page using
a table that is invisible on the Web page itself,
but it's great way to line up text with graphics and so on.
So you've got that now in CorelDRAW. Something called Live text preview.
This is a great new feature that's very intuitive. It let's you interact with text on your screen,
and experiment with different settings without actually choosing those settings.
So once you have got the look that you are after, you can then apply that change.
So you can actually see what it's going to look like before you make that application.
I like that. Kind of like a real time preview.
Easy font identification through something called what the font.
If for example, you have received a file from someone else and you are having difficulty
identifying the fonts that were used, you can capture a font and send it to, WhatTheFont.com,
you can see it's available in English only, and it will identify your
font for you. And then that will help you, if you plan on
working on that file for example, and you want to keep things consistent.
Something you can do now, is take paragraph text and mirror it, and keep in mind we're
going to be doing all this stuff as we move through the lessons in this title.
we'll be working with paragraph text, and I will show you how to mirror it.
Something you couldn't do before. So if you wanted to for example, have a reflection
of your paragraph text. You can see, the mirror option allows you
to do that now, and it's interactive. I kind of like that.
You can do it vertically or horizontally, it's up to you.
It's better support for quotation marks. If you work in multiple languages you'll know
that quotation marks are styled differently in different languages,
so here you can see that we can actually work with different styles of quotation marks,
depending on the language we're working in, kind of cool.
Now to go to the next section, I can click the right arrow, the right navigation button,
or I could go back and just click right on Design assets.
Exact same thing happens, takes me to the Design assets section, and you can see down
here I have got several new or enhanced features as well, including this
first one which is support for Raw camera files.
If you have a digital camera and it's capable of storing your photos, your images in that
raw format, meaning there are no adjustments made for
brightness or contrast or saturation etcetera. You are left with what is called a raw file
and you have got raw camera file support now in CorelDRAW.
So you can bring them right into draw, kind of cool.
Enhance compatibility, now draws have always been compatible with other applications out
there, but it's been even further improved now, support
of file formats now include, you can see Illustrator CS3 and Photoshop CS3.
All kinds of different formats that can be imported, and in some cases exported as well
from CorelDRAW. we're going to be looking at importing and
exporting in this title. There is a New search capability for templates.
There are lots of templates to choose from and when you're starting a new project,
you can get a great head start using a template, while templates are even easier to find right
now. At least to find the right template that is
on your computer. There is a browser, preview and search options,
that we'll talk about later on. When we create a new file from a template,
they are Extras and when we click on Extras, you can see how it expands to tell us
that the Graphics Suite X4, just puts 4000 new clip art images at your finger tips.
That is a lot of clip art images. Now one of the options during installation
is to install all those directly on your computer, or you can access them from the installed
CD, it's up to you. I have chosen to put all of mine on my computer.
I have plenty of room for it. So I really do have them at my fingertips.
There is some new fonts as well, an extended selection of new fonts, including single-line
engraving fonts, great for those for people who are using draw
to create engravings. You can see some additional language support
down here as well. Enhance search functionality, so you can use
keywords and notes and file types, you can search by date and all kinds
of cool features to allow you to find and keep track of your work here in CorelDRAW.
Updated user interface, that we'll be talking about as we explore the new user interface,
and there's something called thumbnails now. So you got some redesigned icons and menus
and controls in the application that gives you a new fresh look,
and more intuitive working environment, and we'll be exploring that in detail when we
open up a file and explore our user interface, helps you
stay organized too. Let's move to that third section.
I'm going to click my right navigation button down here to go to the Workflow section here,
where you will see something called PowerTRACE. This is really nicer -- or some enhancements
to PowerTRACE now, like centerline tracing, for more accurate curves and strokes,
for tracing technical illustrations in line drawings or signatures.
So you can take a bitmap image and trace it and turn it into a vector image.
This will all make better sense, when we talk more about the differences between bitmap
and vector images, and the advantages of each. You can go to Review and collaboration tools
here by clicking this to see that there is something called concept share.
A valuable collaboration tool, if you plan on working with others on projects, you can
get real time feedback from clients for example, or colleagues if you are collaborating
on a project. Concept share is something we'll look at later
on. Improved print merge functionality, so if
you are going to be merging, for example, names and addresses to create invitations
or labels, it's a lot easier to do now in CorelDRAW x4.
There is Search capability again, when saving and opening files.
There is those keywords and in search by author, and subject, and date, and so on.
Automatic product updates is another option. Now you can receive messages and information
about new content and product updates, we saw from the Updates tab
in the previous lesson, where you can go to set all of that up.
When we're done with the welcome screen, we clicked the close button up here, in fact,
we cannot do anything in CorelDRAW unless we go back to Quick Start and make a selection
from here, or close this up and make our selections from the menu's or
the Toolbars. So in the next lesson, we'll open up a file
and take a tour of this user interface to get you comfortable in your surroundings.