Convert Corel Draw to Affinity Designer

[John Rostron]

I had been using Corel Draw to create maps of my local woodland, and I decided it was about time I converted them to Designer. This post reports how it went, what worked and what didn't.

 

I exported the CDR as a pdf, then opened it in Affinity. The appearance was OK, but some lettering did not look quite right. In the layers panel, all the various objects in the cdr file were there as separate layers, but there were none of the original groupings. Indeed, some of the grouped objects were separated by other objects.

 

Some of the objects seem to have been split into two or more segments. These include some curves and some text objects, especially those text objects where they had been wrapped along a curve.

 

I have re-written most text objects and now they look fine. I did need to reposition them slightly though.

 

I have been grouping the various objects into their original groups.

 

So far, I seem to have reconstructed the original to my satisfaction. All I need to do now is to see if it will print as A2.

[gdenby]

Asking out of curiosity, have you tried exporting as .svg? Any different results?

[John Rostron]

Asking out of curiosity, have you tried exporting as .svg? Any different results?

I did try exporting to .svg and the imported file did not seem as comprehensive. That was a week or so back though. I will try it again for comparison.

[John Rostron]

I exported the original .cdr file to both .svg and .pdf with some interesting results.

 

The appearance of the .pdf import into Affinity was very close to what I expected, but there were some inconsistencies in some text. However, as indicated earlier, the various objects were not organized in any way.

 

The appearance of the .svg import was almost the same, but the background was transparent (not an issue in this case). However, some of the Artistic Text clearly was not right. In cases where the label should be vertical, the letters were all in the normal orientation but stacked one above the other! Each letter appeared as a separate text object. Frame text and some artistic text looked OK. The two images attached are crops that show this re-orientation of the text items. The first is the .pdf version, the second the .svg.

 

The big differences were in the Layers Panel. the .pdf import had only two layers, with all the objects as single item and no grouping. The .svg import had preserved much of the original structure (apart from splitting up the Artistic Text).

 

Looking closely at what was Frame Text in Corel Draw, in the .svg import, this has become Artistic text, positioned more-or-less correctly. In the .pdf import it appears as a Text Box.

 

I think that there was probably no winner in this. For any future export, I would try both and see which best fits my needs, even combining the two if needs be!