Your Very Own Interface
How to make Corel applications read your mind
Not that we want you to click away early, but this article won’t really teach you about any of CorelDRAW’s cool special effects. No drop shadows or distortions, no warping or meshing, and no transparent whatevers. Reading this article will not make you a better artist, and you won’t get rich overnight, unless you are already destined to. Still not ready to ditch this article? Okay, how about this: If you follow along with it, you might not even create so much as a single rectangle. That ought to do it…
If you’re still here, then we’ll tell you about the masterpiece that you will create. From this article, you will create the perfect CorelDRAW interface—one so tuned to your preferences and tendencies that you’d think it is reading your mind. No company making software today is as proficient as Corel Corp. at designing a customizable interface, and CorelDRAW 9 and 10 lead the brigade.
A Space to Work
All of Corel’s applications employ the concept of a “workspace”—the collection of settings set, options opted for, toolbars turned on, dockers docked, and flyouts flown out that together make up the way the program looks, feels, and works. Not too many DRAW users know that you can create more than one workspace, most content to work with the default workspace. Before you begin any significant remodeling of the interface, create a workspace that is all yours, by visiting Tools | Options | Workspace. Decide on a name for your workspace and set it to be current, as shown in Figure 1 . The one labeled _default is the plain vanilla configuration that we all see the first time we start the program (and the one that most are content to use). The next is to help Illustrator defectors with their transition to DRAW, and third is for those who prefer the way CorelDRAW 8 looked and felt. And then there is the one the author created for himself; the checked box indicates that it is the current and active workspace. (Previous versions use a large dot to indicate the active workspace.) Any interface change-intentional or otherwise-will get written to and stored in the active workspace.
It’s impossible to please everyone all of the time, and Corel’s engineers know it. They thought about which commands and functions should always be available (they would reside on the Standard toolbar), and which ones are only needed in certain contexts (in which case, they would be placed on a property bar). For the most part, they succeeded, but everyone is going to have his or her pet peeves.
One of our favorite “for instances” is the on-screen Nudge setting, a wonderful addition to the property bar, saving countless trips to Options when we want to change Nudge from 1 point to 1 pica, or from 1 point to ¼ of a point. We love it.
We also hate it. Corel placed it on the so-called “No Selection” property bar—the one that you see when no objects in the drawing are selected. But that’s not when you want to change a Nudge setting; you want to change it after selecting an object and getting ready to nudge it. And unfortunately, the property bar that becomes visible when you select an object does not include the Nudge setting. This requires that you deselect the object, change the Nudge, and then reselect. No good! We want this great little Nudge adjuster to always be present. We want it to be visible when we have one object selected, multiple objects selected, a group selected, a bitmap selected. Any time, any place. In other words, we want it on the Standard toolbar, which always remains the same. Here is how you would move the Nudge settings from the property bar to the Standard toolbar:
1. Press and continue to hold Alt until we tell
you to stop. By holding Alt, all toolbars become unlocked and their
elements free to be moved.
2. Place your cursor inside the Nudge box and begin dragging it
up.
3. Find a place on the Standard toolbar where you would like its
new home to be, like, say, next to the Zoom Levels drop-down list.
4. Release Alt and note that Nudge has left its spot on the property
bar and taken up residence on the Standard toolbar.
To copy rather than move an interface element, hold Ctrl during the above operation. To remove an element altogether, drag it away from any toolbar (like to the middle of the page) and release Alt.
Now we’re happy campers—the Nudge settings are always available, no matter the context, and the interface is now smarter for it. With this adjustment, you will reduce the amount of unnecessary clicks, the amount of stress on your mouse-clicking finger, and the amount of time it takes to perform perfunctory tasks. For regular users of the program, that’s what it’s all about.
Menu Mania and Hotkey Heaven
Custom toolbars make up one leg of the customization tri-fecta. Ambitious DRAW users can also season to taste the menus and all of the elements that reside on them and the entire lineup of hotkeys across the program. The place to go for both bonanzas is the Customize page of Tools | Otions. There you will find a treasure trove of options, starting with a list of every single command that exists for the program. This is significant for two reasons: many of these commands are buried in sub-menus and are hard to find; and about two dozen of them have never been placed on the interface. Commands like automatic double-spacing of paragraphs, four-point outline, and interactive kerning adjustment—you would never know they even existed if you didn’t know to look for them here in Customize. Figure 2 shows the Customize dialog.
Any command that you find here can be placed on the interface, be it on a toolbar, in a menu, or assigned to a hotkey. Furthermore, DRAW keeps a separate set of keystroke definitions for when your cursor is planted in a string of text. If your cursor is planted, typing S produces an S. But if you are not working in text, then S can mean something else. You can program all of the QWERTY keys to do things for you, without the need for Ctrl, Shift, Alt, or contorted combinations thereof.
We use them to activate controls that would otherwise require a mouse trip to the edge of the window or up to the menus. For instance, if you want to use the Eyedropper tool to pick up a color that is in a photograph, the last thing you want to do is mouse over to the Toolbox to activate it, only to have to then mouse back to the page. By assigning a single-key hotkey, the experience is so much easier: you hover over the photograph with the mouse, press E to activate the tool, and click to get my color assignment.
Interview Yourself
The first step to customization involves identifying the way you operate the program and the areas of the program that work against you. For the next week, keep a notepad handy and note the following:
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What commands do you use the most?
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What operations require more than two clicks? More than three clicks?
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Are there commands you use often that live on menu flyouts? Flyouts require you to first pull down the menu, then hover over a choice, and then mouse over and down a list of commands. Way too inefficient.
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What procedures require you to move your mouse to the edge of the screen for no purpose other than activating a tool?
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Have you written any scripts? By themselves, scripts are wonderful for automating a tedious task, but you can go even further by taking your script and placing it on a toolbar or assigning a hotkey to it.
These are prime candidates for customization, and
identifying them is half the battle. Don’t fix them now—you’re
on deadline. Just make note of them. Then if you can dedicate 30
minutes when you are not on deadline, that’s all you would
need to build the foundation for your ultimate CorelDRAW interface.
Create hotkeys for activating tools, instead of having to mouse
to the Toolbox. Place icons on the Standard toolbar for commands
you use often (and get rid of the ones you don’t use—we
never click on the New, Save, Open, and Print icons, so we fired
them). Rearrange menus to reduce the need to navigate flyouts. And
turn unintelligible icons into English (e.g. make the button display
Resample Bitmap instead of 
.
All it has to do is make sense to you; you’re not designing
this for the whole world. You have a luxury that Corel’s developers
do not enjoy. As long as there is a method to your madness, you’re
in the pink.
Managing Workspaces
Once you have created your dream interface, you should treat it like important data. You should back it up and you should know how to restore it. The workspace files get written to every time you change an option and every time you close the program, and it stands to reason that the files that get updated the most often are the ones at highest risk for corruption and damage. Indeed, corrupted workspaces are leading causes of system weirdness with Corel products. Keeping a clean copy of your workspace is your best insurance against said weirdness.
The other skill you’ll want to develop is the fine art of sharing your workspace with other workers or other systems. Once you get accustomed to your personal interface, it will be hard to go back, and you’ll want to have it on your traveling PC and the one you use at home.
In DRAW 10, backing up and sharing your workspace are easy to do, thanks to the new Import and Export buttons. When you export, you create one small file that can easily be transported or archived. When you import, you have the option to merge the incoming settings into an existing workspace or create a new one, and you can choose which settings you want to accept (e.g. just hotkeys but not menus, just toolbars and menus, etc.)
When using previous versions of DRAW, you need to know where the workspace files live so you can copy and archive them yourself. Under Windows 9X, you’ll find them in the Workspaces subfolder under the main folder into which you installed the program. On a Windows NT system, the configuration files are stored under the path
\ winnt \ profiles \ username \ application data \ corel \ coreldraw9 (or 8).
With Windows 2000, you’ll find them at
\ documents and settings \ username \ application data \ corel \ coreldraw9.
Each workspace that you create gets its own subfolder at this location, and each of these subfolders contains two .ini files and several .cfg files for tracking toolbar and menu assignments and hotkey definitions. In addition, for each workspace that you create, CorelDRAW creates a small file with a .cw_ extension. An Explorer window of the Workspace subfolder would look like Figure 3 . Note that there are separate folders for each of the main applications in the CorelDRAW 10 box-DRAW, PAINT, RAVE, and TRACE. This article applies equally to these apps, and you can also customize VENTURA 8 and WordPerfect.
More than Just Efficiency
I admit to being a computer nazi. My desk is a mess but my desktop is perfectly organized. I know exactly where I keep files and where I install programs, and I ride herd on my fonts and my clipart. Everything is in its place, and when I turn to a program that I use often, I want it to operate as if it knows exactly what I’m thinking. And while I’m pretty good at wasting time (one of my favorite sports is golf, which consumes an entire morning), when I’m in front of my PC, I want to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible (more time for golf).
But there is another motivation that is even more important. The older I get, the more aware I become of all of the clicking, arm motions, and typing required in the normal course of daily affairs. A customized interface can dramatically reduce this load, and that translates directly into lower risk of repetitive stress injuries. I want to be the setter for our volleyball team for another 15 years; I don’t want to be forced into early retirement because I clicked a mouse too many times.
The only problem with all of this is the complete and total addiction that could come over you. Once you start customizing, once you start to reduce the tedium in your regular work-flow, once you start discovering how one click can take the place of a dozen, there will be no stopping you. Take it from me, the world’s worst (and happiest) addict.