Technical Illustrating - CorelDRAW verses CAD

TDT - Productivity solutions for tech illustrators.

	"I wish CorelDRAW had CAD like snaps". It does! First go to the Layout Menu and turn on "Snap to Objects". Create another circle but this time make it 0.25 inches in diameter. At this point you could move it using the position commands on the Property Bar but we are exploring a snap you may not have known about. The invisible center snap. CorelDRAW selects the snap points it will use by where you pick the object up.
	First temporarily put a fill in our little circle with a color of your choice and drag it close to the top right corner of the square. Now zoom in close and choose the little circle. You need quick eyes here. Pick it up near the center and begin to drag it over a bit. Did you see it, a little snap marker in the middle of the circle. Pick it up near the bottom center, you should see a snap marker on the bottom quadrant. Back to our center snap. Pick it up near the center of the circle and drag it to the top left corner of the square. Neat ain’t it. You have center, quadrant, end point, etc. snaps just like CAD except you cannot turn them on and off selectively.
	Zoom back out. Now we will use the Property Bar to move another object. However this time you will fix the size and move the object all at once. Create a square about 1 inch square using the rectangle tool. At the Property Bar position settings (first numbers) enter x = -0.50 and y = -0.50, at the size settings enter x = 1.00 and y = 1.00 and click on the page. Entering all of the properties at once is more efficient.

	Start		Back	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8		Next		End	Learn More