I am trying to export line art from X4 (SP1) to Adobe Illustrator (I have CS3).  Most things work okay, but many lines change from solid to dashed,  change width,  or change color.  Installing SP1 helped a little, but there are still miles to go.

I am a professor in a medical school.  Have used CorelDraw for over 17 years.  It was fine for lecture illustrations and journal article illustrations, but now I'm working on a textbook and the publisher will only accept AI files.  If I can't export, I will have to transition.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

Hi Jim,

I'm a medical illustrator (you can view some of my work here in the gallery: http://coreldraw.com/photos/willstu/default.aspx).  I do ALL my illustration work in Corel (I have for more years than I care to think about).  I've never found this to be a problem with publishers... I've worked with just about all the major medical publishing companies.  I've found that publishers are quite happy with high resolution tiffs (especially if your willing to size them to their specifications).  Tiffs also have the benefit of being harder to edit which keeps the layout folks at the publisher from playing with them too much (a problem I have found in the past).

You might want to check the requirements for submitted illustrations and see if Tiffs will work.

Rob

Jim,

The problems you've encountered could have something to do with choices you
make when exporting and they could simply be limitations of Illustrator.
There is a checkbox in the export dialog box that will convert outlines to
curves. This is absolutely necessary for dashed lines because Illustrator
doesn't support them in the saw way that we use in CorelDRAW. Sure, they can
do dashed lines, it is just accomplished differently.

If that doesn't work, what about EPS files? The bozos at the publisher
(every publisher I've ever dealt with was full of bozos in the production
department) can't screw up EPS files (usually) and they will do everything
you can do in CorelDRAW.

The best format for export to Adobe Illustrator is PDF. The reason is simple, the newest versions of AI (CS, CS2 and CS3) are different than previous. If you Publish to PDF in the File menu, choose "PDF for prepress" from the presets. As an option, you can convert text to curve or made any change (cropmarks, bleed or what you need). Illustrator can open a PDF file as native format (also CorelDRAW can do this)

 

willstu:

Hi Jim,

I'm a medical illustrator (you can view some of my work here in the gallery: http://coreldraw.com/photos/willstu/default.aspx).  I do ALL my illustration work in Corel (I have for more years than I care to think about).  I've never found this to be a problem with publishers... I've worked with just about all the major medical publishing companies.  I've found that publishers are quite happy with high resolution tiffs (especially if your willing to size them to their specifications).  Tiffs also have the benefit of being harder to edit which keeps the layout folks at the publisher from playing with them too much (a problem I have found in the past).

You might want to check the requirements for submitted illustrations and see if Tiffs will work.

Rob

 

Thanks. Rob.  Great art work on your site!  I especially like the skull (and, of course, the petroglyphs).

I'm gratified to meet a professional illustrator who is enthusiastic about CorelDraw.  My experience is the same as yours.  I have been publishing for over thirty years in The Journal of Neurophysiology, the Journal of Neuroscience, a variety of other scientific journals, and have written numerous chapters for Churchill Livingston and Elsevier.  I have never had a problem with CorelDraw illustrations exported as TIFF files.  Until now.

Our current contract is with LWW.  They want the art in three layers: one layer for the drawings and photographs; a second layer for the leader lines; and a third layer for the labels in EDITABLE text. 

X4 to CS3 takes care of almost all of this, but there are still some solid lines in X4 that end up dashed in CS3.  At this point, I think I will just go in and fix the lines in CS3.  I've spent more than two days searching for an elegant fix, and I think the time for brute strength has arrived.  Deadlines approach.

Regarding publishers:  I worked after school in a little print shop and weekly newspaper when I was in high school.  I can hand-set a stick of type with the best of them.  I loved it!  etaoin shrdlu!  But I thought I had left printing and become a  scientist/author/illustrator.  Guess I was over-optimistic...

Best

Jim

 Jim and Ariel -

Thanks for your thoughts.  I have now tried all the permutations of the check-boxes in the Export Menu.  Better, but not good enough.  The only problem with pdf and eps is that our publisher insists on three different layers (see response to Rob).  Otherwise, either solution would be fine.  But whenever I have exported from CorelDraw to either pdf (prepress) or eps, my multiple layers collapse to a single one.

So, I guess I will be learning more than I ever wanted to know about AI.  (I have been using CorelDraw since version 2 and it has seldom let me down.  And we will continue to use it to develop the textbook and only export to AI for submission to LWW.)

Best -

Jim

Thanks Jim, for the kind words! 

Good luck with that manuscript!  I have done a few books for Lippincott in the past, but it has been a few years (just finished one for Elsevier).  They have definitely changed their requirements.  I still have an editor friend there and have sent her a quick note just to see what they want in the way of submissions.  I think they have been cutting back a bit at LWW and maybe it's their way of getting authors to do some of the work for them .

I'll let you know if I find out anything interesting that might be helpful for you.

All the best,

Rob

I dont know if its of any relevance but I found when exporting to AI from CD12, lines that were set to appear "behind fill" didnt appear at all in the AI export.

Have yet to try it in X4