When and When Not to Use Styles

Styles are designed to save you time. Here are some tips for deciding if you need to create a style:

•  When you want to manage the attributes of many objects. A style’s greatest value is the collective control it gives you over the appearance of multiple objects. You never have to worry about one of them being wrong—they’re either all correct or they’re all wrong.

•  When you have several attributes you want to apply at once. Simply make the changes to one object, save the changes to the style, and all objects using that style will automatically display the new formatting.

•  When you anticipate that you might be changing all instances of one color, fill, or outline in a complex drawing. With styles, tracking down and changing all occurrences of a particular attribute gets done in one or two steps rather than 10 or 20 or more.

•  When you want to control elements across multiple pages or even multiple files. Styles can be saved in templates (described in the upcoming section), so they can be used with various projects, like a monthly publication or newsletter.

Sometimes, other tools will work better than styles. Here are situations where you may want to choose another strategy:

•  You already have a custom palette created, and you want to quickly assign colors to objects. Though you could create several styles containing these colors, using a palette is a better method.

•  You want one or more objects to look exactly like an original; this is a job for the Clone command. Clones don’t need to be applied or updated; they automatically and instantly take on all the appearance attributes of the master object.

•  You want to borrow just one attribute of a formatted object and are not interested in maintaining a direct connection to that object with a style. Though you could apply the style and then strip off the attributes you don’t want, it’s wasted effort. A better way is to use either Edit Ø Copy Properties From, or Effects Ø Copy. Both commands let you choose the particular attribute you want to copy from an existing object. This is better than using a style when all you want is a piece of the style.

And finally, some situations call for yet another CorelDRAW efficiency expert: scripts. We’ll get to them in Chapter 33.

Working with Templates

Templates help you organize and manage styles. You can store a group of styles in a template designed for a specific type of drawing, such as a slide presentation or a sales brochure. Template files store more than just styles, though; they can also save page-layout information and text and graphic objects. A template for a slide presentation could include the page setup and the company logo, as well as styles for bullets and titles. A template for sales brochures might contain the graphic elements that appear in every brochure. In addition to the templates you create yourself, DRAW includes several hundred predesigned templates for everything from announcements to box designs.

Templates are separate files with extensions of .cdt instead of .cdr. They contain all of the formatting and styles you choose to store in them. This is convenient for your regularly recurring projects, because you can keep all the styles you use for a particular project or client in a template, safely protected from your day-to-day activities. DRAW always starts with the default template, coreldrw.cdt, loaded, but changing to a different template is easy.

NOTE When you create styles, you don’t have to save them in a template—DRAW stores them directly in the drawing (the .cdr file). If you don’t save the styles in a template, the styles are loaded in the Styles docker when you open the .cdr file that you saved them in. But unless you save the styles in a template, they’ll only be available to the drawing you created them in. The advantage to saving them in a template is that they are available in other DRAW drawings, as well.

The Default Template

The coreldrw.cdt template includes default styles for graphics, artistic text, and paragraph text. You can modify this template by adding styles or changing the default styles, following the procedures already outlined in this chapter. After making style changes, if you want the changes to be available in future drawings using this template, you must save it. If you don’t, the new and modified styles are only saved in the .cdr file—they do not become part of the template.

To save changes to the default coreldrw.cdt template, select Template Ø Save As Default for New Documents from the docker’s context menu. You can also use Template Ø Save As to explicitly save over the top of coreldrw.cdt—these two actions would have the same result of altering DRAW’s default template. And for good measure, you can achieve the same result by going to Tools Ø Options Ø Document, checking Save Options As Defaults for New Documents, and then browsing the list of settings whose current conditions you could choose to be defaults.

	NOTE Coreldrw.cdt is a plain old file, residing on your hard drive like all other files. Therefore, before you start any wild experiments with your default settings, you might want to back up this default template first. You’ll find it in the Draw subdirectory under the main CorelDRAW 9 directory.

Creating a New Template

Instead of filling up coreldrw.cdt with all kinds of different styles, you may find it more effective to save particular groups of styles in individual templates. Then, when you’re ready for a certain set of styles, you can just load the desired template.

As mentioned earlier, DRAW’s templates can contain more than just styles; they can contain any element that would normally go into a drawing. With templates, you can give yourself a major-league running start toward the completion of a repetitive project. You can create the template before you’ve made style changes, before you’ve laid out the page, and before you have created objects; or you can do it afterward. In fact, it’s probably more practical to save the template after making these changes to a drawing, so you don’t have to continue to tweak it as you refine your work.

You must use the Styles docker (Ctrl+F5) to create templates because the object context menu does not provide access to template creation (only style creation). So to create a template, you select Template Ø Save As from the docker’s context menu and name the template. If you just want the styles from the current drawing, you’re done. If you want the page layout and the elements on the page also, click the With Contents option to save the page setup and any text and graphic objects that may be in the document you plan on making a template.

In Figure 31.5, we are about to save the current lineup of styles as a template for newsletter creation. Note that we have created several new artistic text styles and that we have eliminated all of those dreadful bullet styles. Note two other things:

•  We have checked With Contents, so the elements on the page will be part of our starting point for creating newsletters.

•  We are saving the template in the Draw directory, where coreldrw.cdt is located. We note this because it is not the factory-defined location for saving templates. We tried saving templates in the Template subdirectory, but we didn’t like it, because that is not where coreldrw.cdt resides. Alternating between coreldrw.cdt and ours in another subdirectory became annoying. We prefer to keep them all in one location, so DRAW can continue to look in the same place. If Corel’s engineers wanted us to use the Template subdirectory, they should have put coreldrw.cdt there.

FIGURE 31.5  Our starting point for creating newsletters

The Newsletter template in Figure 31.5 is quite sparse, to be frank, making it suitable for newsletters that might take radically different forms each month. For a more structured publication, the template could be quite specific, with many fill-in-the-blank elements already in place.

	TIP You can also save a template by issuing a conventional File Ø Save As command, changing the file type to CDT, choosing the location, and saving the file. When you do this, the contents automatically get saved as part of the template.