I had a customer ask me to do a layout for him on a metal plate with some thermark so he could laser it. I could have done this creating 3 columns and used the align tools but I thought it would be a good exercise to show you how to use the table command in X4 and X5. The table command allows me to add the 3 columns I need to create this layout very easy. Check out the Thermark on Steel video that was done on this topic in my video section.

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One way to increase the perceived value of your product offering is to include a clients logo with that product. If you want to impress your client and provide them with the best looking product you can do than offer to reproduce there logo. Not only will they be impressed but they will be more inclined to pay you top dollar for that product. The one problem with offering to reproduce a clients artwork is that the artwork that they supply is not in either a good format (ie traced) or may be in a bad quality web format (gif, jpeg, png). In this tutorial well will look at tracing a one colour good quality logo. Available in X3, X4 and X5. See our video on CorelTrace

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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.

One of the problems that you will encounter after you install CorelDraw X4 or X5 is that your default pen width is set to .007. This creates a problem when you want to create a cut line for your laser. This is because most lasers will only cut a vector line that is less that .007. A vector line that is thicker than .006 is considered to be a raster line. For this reason it is advantageous to set the default pen width at hairline. This is easy to do in CorelDraw.

When you are doing laser engraving or sublimation (sawgrass driver) you need to turn off your colour correction and work in the RGB colour space. In this article we will address this setup.

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This article will discuss the technique involved in creating a Filleted box that we would use to cut out plates on a laser.