What’s New in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite – March 2023 Subscriber Update

Designed with your productivity in mind, CorelDRAW® Graphics Suite is trusted by millions of graphics pros and design teams around the globe for endless creativity with no time wasted. This tutorial will highlight some of the new features and enhancements.  

The Variable Outline Tool 

The Variable Outline tool, available in CorelDRAW and Corel DESIGNER, enables you to interactively adjust lines, curves, and outlines, using nodes at one or more points along the path to specify different line widths. 

This tool is available in the toolbox and can be accessed by the V shortcut key.

Clicking a curve changes its outline to a red dashed outline, and nodes can be added in several ways, including double clicking on the outline. Each node has a Side 1 and Side 2 width, which can be adjusted together or separately, by dragging an arrow or specifying exact values on the property bar.

Clicking on the curve and dragging both adds a node and sets its width in one step.  

Variable Outline properties can also be adjusted in the Properties docker, where nodes are displayed along the node controller as a function of percent distance from the curve’s start point.

The Outline Pen window also has a Variable Outline section.

When a curve or line is selected with the Pick tool, the property bar features a Variable Outline tool icon to activate the tool.

And variable outline properties can easily be copied from one curve to another, using the Copy Variable Outline icon on the property bar.

To learn more, watch the full tutorial How to Create Variable-width Outlines.

Online Template Library  

When starting a document from a template, the Create a New Document window opens to the Templates tab. 

New in the March 2023 subscriber update, subscribers can now access a wide selection of cloud-based templates in the online template library, which can be filtered by category, or sorted by newly added, recently used, or name.

Sorting by Recommended for You presents templates relevant to your CorelDRAW profile survey. We’ll cover this survey a bit more in the next section. 

Opening a template starts a new document based on that template, and also downloads the template for easy access later. You can filter to see only your downloaded templates by clicking the Show Downloads Only icon in the top right corner of the window.

Opening your local templates also displays your downloaded templates, as well as a set of pre-installed sampler templates and any custom templates you’ve saved to the Corel Templates folder.

To learn more, watch the full tutorial How to Use CorelDRAW Templates.

Practice Projects 

Practice projects are CorelDRAW (CDR) and Corel PHOTO-PAINT (CPT) files that you can use for learning, training, or demos. 

New in the March 2023 subscriber update, you’ll now be presented with personalized practice project recommendations suited to your skill level, experience, and project types, when you complete your profile survey.

If you didn’t fill out the survey, or if you want to update your answers, head to the Learn docker. On the Explore tab, click the Personalize Results icon.

Select your proficiency level and the types of projects you work on, and you’ll see updated practice project recommendations tailored to you.

The full collection of practice projects can be found in the Learn docker. The Filter icon enables you to access all types of learning content, or you can filter to see only Practice Projects.  Sort by Recommended for You to see practice projects that best match your needs, based on your profile survey.

You can also sort by Most Recent to see any recently-added practice projects, or Most Relevant if you’re searching projects for a keyword. 

Clicking a practice project downloads and opens the file.  In addition to the completed version of the project, each project includes step-by-step interactive instructions to help you complete the project successfully, and in-progress project design elements you can consult for reference. 

To learn more, watch the full tutorial on CorelDRAW’s Personalized Learning Tools.

CorelDRAW Academy 

While on the subject of learning content, here’s another way to get an innovative edge in your design journey. Launched in 2022, the CoreDRAW Academy can be accessed for free by all CorelDRAW Graphics Suite subscribers and maintenance customers. Simply open the Welcome Screen, click CorelDRAW Academy, and click SIGN UP NOW. 

Designed by creative professionals, the CorelDRAW Academy offers modular-based training sessions that are engaging, easy to follow, and focused on real-life design scenarios, so that you can incorporate what you’ve learned into your everyday projects.  

When you successfully complete all modules of the course, you’ll receive a certificate of completion that validates your training experience. 

Visit the CorelDRAW Academy to learn more.

New Document Window  

The Create a New Document window in CorelDRAW was redesigned for the September 2022 subscriber update to provide a central location for starting your drawings.  

This window now has two tabs as we saw earlier, Document Settings and Templates. 

Document settings options are used when starting a new blank file. You can specify document settings from scratch including size, layout, and colors, or you can choose a preset. There are numerous presets in a number of categories, including print, web, device-specific, and social media.

Each preset includes predefined settings for page size and orientation, primary color mode, units of measurement, and resolution.  

As an example, look in the Social category for LinkedIn presets, or enter “linkedin” in the search field. The LinkedIn Cover preset uses pixels, with the dimensions required for a LinkedIn cover image, in landscape orientation, and with RGB color.

The Layout section has a Bleed option, which means that bleed can be enabled from the start, rather than having to open the Document Options and enable the bleed in Advanced Settings. 

Presets can also be sorted by name, recently used, and largest or smallest page size.  

To start a new document from a local or online template, switch to the Templates tab, as we saw in an earlier section.   

Here are a few other enhancements from the September 2022 subscriber update.

WebP File Support 

CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT now offer support for the Google Web Picture (*.webp) file format. This open standard format developed by Google provides lossless and lossy compression for images designed for use on the web. 

You can import WEBP files as you would any other supported file.

To export as WEBP, choose File > Export For > Web, and choose the WEBP format. Or choose File > Export, choose WEBP from the drop down, and click Export. 

Image transparency is maintained on both import and export. 

WEBP lossless images are smaller than PNGs, and lossy images are smaller than JPEG images.

There are several WEBP presets available, or you can manually adjust export settings. There are standard options for quality, which control the compression factor for RGB channels, and for the Compression Ratio between encoding speed, file size, and quality.  

Your WebP export settings can be saved as a custom preset.

Enhancements to Export Workflow 

And speaking of exporting, there have also been a few updates to the Export workflow.  

New file formats in the Export docker include Adobe Illustrator (AI), AutoCAD Drawing Database (DWG), and AutoCAD Drawing Interchange Format (DXF).   Assets and pages can also now be renamed directly in the docker.

And finally, for selected export formats, the Export window now includes a setting that allows you to crop to page boundaries upon export.

To learn more, watch the full tutorial on the Export docker.