One of the more popular downloads off the Epilog Website is the music box. A number of customers have asked how to recreate the technique of interlocking tabs. This is easy in CorelDraw and we can use the existing music box design to show you how to recreate the design.

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Sometimes when you have to set up for a coaches plaque or a annual plaque where you are engraving all the names it is easier to use a table layout. A table keeps all the text in line, spaced and you can justify the cells if you want.

One of the more buried techniques in CorelDraw is the ability to created text that is vertical. That is it runs North South and has one letter per line. You can type a letter one at a time and press enter but the alignment is not always right. This Technique is fast and does the job. Check out the video on Vertical Text in CorelDraw

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Here is a job one of my dealers asked us to do. This is not a hard job but he did not have a laser so we did the job for him. He emailed me the suggested setup from his customer. I also had to go to Brands of the World to import the lions logo for him. I had to copy the text paste it into CorelDraw, than format the text. The next step was to import in the lions logo than output the job to the laser so that I could engrave it onto acrylic.

Sometimes when you want to scale a vector drawing up you may want that line width to scale up or down with the other objects. This is quite easy in CorelDraw.

One of the more popular techniques used with photographs is turning that photograph in to what it is called a vignette. The vignette is a technique where you start to fad an image from a predetermined spot in a photo and fad it to nothing at the edge of the photo. Creating an an oval vignette is the most popular technique and is used extensively by photographers. In this article we will use the powerclip function in CorelDraw to create out oval cutout. Than we will use the vignette command in CorelDraw to create our vignette

A lot of times when you are working with photos you need to crop the photo so that you can focus in on a certain part of the photo. Typically what we are trying to do is to get rid of certain parts of the photo that we do not want. Cropping is the way to do this. There are a number of ways you can crop in CorelDraw. Sometimes it depends on the version that you are working in. For example a rectangle proper cropping tool was not available in CorelDraw until X4. In this article we will look at Power Clipping an image to do an oval crop in CorelDraw. To take it one step further we will look at doing an oval crop in Corel PhotoPaint

One of the new features to come out of Corel X4 and X5 is the ability to see what direction your machine will be moving based on the object. Typically when it comes to engraving whether it is with a laser or with a rotary our direction was controlled via two main nodes on the object you are working with. The home node is where you object begins to engrave. The end node is where the engraving ends. In earlier versions of Coreldraw X3 and before the way we had ot check for the beginning of an object was to select the shape tool click on the object and press the HOME key. This would take us to the beginning. The END key on your keyboard would take you to the end. Now with X4 and X5 we actually see the direction of the path by a set of arrows.

There are two types of text in CorelDraw. The first and the one that is used a lot is Artistic Text. The second type which we discuss later is Paragraph text.