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CDR corel im/export


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dear Affinities, 

We regularly work with Chinese designers as we manufacture our products in China.   

Our company exclusively uses Apple devices in the office as well as in the creative area.
 
Currently we use Adobe Indesign and Co. for our artwork because we thought this would be the international standard.

it is not.

Very often we had to find out that our Chinese contact persons obviously did not use our artworks but copied our printable pdf in corel draw. (copied in a way of re-work the same file) 

the result was/is usually an absolute disaster.

after many conversations we found out that almost all processing partners such as laser (for engraving brand names or product labels)
as well as printing plants (for printing on cardboard boxes) exclusively use PC and Coreldraw. 

In China, it seems that Corel has become the market leader thanks to Coreldraw's performance and pricing policy. 

Knowing this, it would be great if Affinity products could be expanded to include CDR "Import from" and "export as". 

just as an idea ;-)

Edited by greenius
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  • Staff

@greenius

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums :) 

Though it could be added to the whole range or Publisher I have moved your suggestions to the Affinity Designer forum as it is most appropriate to that application for CDR import/export

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Have you tried exporting as pdf or svg? It does work (mostly) the other way (CDR to AD).

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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  • 2 weeks later...

äh ,.. of course we are making pdf`s (at our side there are studied graphic designers) but our chinese partners oviously cant`t use them the way wea re expecting,... or better said their proceeding "machines" can`t use. 

at the end this is the reason that they are re-doing our files ,.. but, wrong. they are not even using our fonts ! 

 

 

Edited by greenius
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  • 1 year later...

Same exact problem as yours. We need to start working with a Chinese maker to do some yoga mat engraving. They asked for .CDR files.

I checked online to see if there is a converter (albeit, I don't know if I can trust the result) from PSD to CDR but I couldn't find any.

Maybe there can be some other safe conversion to .CDR? From PDF?

Anything you have found I'd really appreciate to know.

You can write to me at

marcodeveglia@gmail.com

P.S.

Started using Affinity yesterday and it's a great software. Just missing the 'export to CDR'. :)

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  • Staff

SVG to CDR would be a closer mapping (for cutters) would it not? has anyone had any success using that approach?

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Thanks for the answers.

The Chinese maker sent me the file types they can manage:
PDF
PSD
CDR
AI
JPG (I don't know about this one, they say they don't manage bitmaps...)

Unfortunately I had no luck in making Illustrator to work on my Mac and that is why I found Affinity (I've been using it for 2 days now, but I really like it).

So, in theory they should be able to use a PSD, but they said they can't. Something lost in translation.

However, they told me we can try with PDF to see if it works. That would be the best because the PSD is about 80Mb and the PDF is 25Kb.

Just sent them a PDF, finger crossed.

M

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I've been a longtime user/devotee to CorelDraw, and yes... its amazing how many industries use CorelDraw as a tool for graphic design and execution. Many CNC pieces of equipment will use CDR files to do a variety of things from printing to cutting vinyl and other materials.  I think many people in the vehicle wrap business use Corel's CDR files.  Corel's GUI is very user friendly, and while I prefer Photoshop to CorelPaint, its the old story about the more you use it, the more you like it.  I'm trying to ween off PS because of Catalina and trying to get more familiar with Infinity Photo. Ironically, I have kept around a PC specifically for two products; CorelDraw and VISIO.  IIRC, in CorelDraw you could save files to an incredible number of formats, even DXF (CAD type drawings).  Same goes for VISIO... you can save a VISIO drawing to almost anything including PDFs, DWG, and I think DXF.  The latter two being AutoCAD standards for the world.  Affinity Photo can "export" as a PDF, PSD, JPG and several other formats. If you Google "VISIO for MAC" you'd see how many people are wishing there was something as intuitive as VISIO that ran on a Mac. If Affinity's team created a hybrid that perhaps brought Corel and Visio capabilities and file saving into the Designer product, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, and probably so would many others.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've been a CorelDraw user since version 3.0 up-to 2020. It's my bread and water for the vector design work I do on my desktop. However, from time to time, I need to work on my Mac, and I don't want to get the CorelDraw Mac version. I have been experimenting with PDF, AI, SVG exported versions, but there is always something missing. It would be awesome to avoid extra layers of translations and use a direct import/export filter for CRD files. As I get more proficient with the Affinity suite, I may wean out from the Corel ecosystem. :-)

If you need beta testers for CDR import/export work, count on me!

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CDR compatibility would be amazing, as Im a 10+ year user of Coreldraw, and use it for both lasercutting and direct to surface printing reasons. I have camera registration systems that make working in one piece of software for two purposes perfect. I have too many files I need to regularly access to just walk away from it.

Lately I feel that Corel's owners seem to be moving into the Adobe way of thinking, and have gone subscription only, which is a pain as I buy the software outright and I refuse to have software that dissapears when you stop paying for it. I dont want to keep supporting them financially.

There is so much promise for Affinity, but the fact that for 5 years people have been asking for DWG/DXF basic file format compatibility and it still has no current timeline of integration, so I cant see them doing CDR type file format any time soon as they dont seem to be that concerned for users with a technical requirement. 

If there was a separate corel type piece of software on  the cards, I would buy it immediately. But as for right now, im using it to open Ai files that have issues opening directly in Corel... basically its a file converter for me until more useful functionality is applied.

Please please please make this software work for technical users, its a massive market!

 

 

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Just a few, my cents to above:

-i tried really various manipulations but COULD NOT provide correct ,vector files for Plotter/Cutter, operated by a guy with Corel /plotter cutter operates mostly or even exclusively on .cdr native files/.

AFAIK: Problem seems mostly by COREL side /although depending who is speaking../ but the question is: what/if could be done in AFFINITY to enable correct export for Plotter/Cutter ??

Thats noticeable segment of our job too...

cheers,

AF Photo+Designer+Publisher and their betas on Win10 x64/Gtx760+AmdFX+24GB RAM

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 5/20/2020 at 4:34 PM, Lasercut said:

CDR compatibility would be amazing, as Im a 10+ year user of Coreldraw, and use it for both lasercutting and direct to surface printing reasons. I have camera registration systems that make working in one piece of software for two purposes perfect. I have too many files I need to regularly access to just walk away from it.

Lately I feel that Corel's owners seem to be moving into the Adobe way of thinking, and have gone subscription only, which is a pain as I buy the software outright and I refuse to have software that dissapears when you stop paying for it. I dont want to keep supporting them financially.

There is so much promise for Affinity, but the fact that for 5 years people have been asking for DWG/DXF basic file format compatibility and it still has no current timeline of integration, so I cant see them doing CDR type file format any time soon as they dont seem to be that concerned for users with a technical requirement. 

If there was a separate corel type piece of software on  the cards, I would buy it immediately. But as for right now, im using it to open Ai files that have issues opening directly in Corel... basically its a file converter for me until more useful functionality is applied.

Please please please make this software work for technical users, its a massive market!

 

 

Such a massive pain point! I want to move over but having 15 years of client files in CorelDraw and no import option is making it impossible... Really wish Affinity could address this especially now that Corel has also moved over to subscription based software. Please Affinity... We need you! I would love to support you guys rather but this is a make or break scenario!

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6 hours ago, Teresa McGregor said:

Such a massive pain point! I want to move over but having 15 years of client files in CorelDraw and no import option is making it impossible... Really wish Affinity could address this especially now that Corel has also moved over to subscription based software. Please Affinity... We need you! I would love to support you guys rather but this is a make or break scenario!

LOL. Got the whole Affinity suite for my Mac; then, got it for my iPad; and, a couple weeks ago for my Windows. Working right now in Windows with Affinity Publisher (AP) on one screen and CorelDraw 2020 on another. It would be so much easier importing the CDRs instead of exporting to WMF or PDF and placing the results in AP.

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@MDV, you should consider removing your email address from the post above, as making it publicly visible on an open forum invites spammers.

If people want to contact you privately they can do so using the private message feature of the forum, so there is no need to provide your email address.

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I would guess that the .CDR format, like .afdesign is a proprietary format, so creating a CDR importer/exporter would be no trivial matter.

The fileinfo.com site says: 

Quote

Is the same true for CMX (Corel EXchange format)? The fileinfo.com site says:

Quote

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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33 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

I would guess that the .CDR format, like .afdesign is a proprietary format, so creating a CDR importer/exporter would be no trivial matter.

Same for all the other locked formats. Now think of any minor / major updates in those locked formats. You have to reverse engineer every single update. Compare, test, write importers / exporters. IMO Serif should concentrate on all open or non-locked or best documented formats to make them work without problems. In a perfect world all file formats would be interchangeable, but we have to face reality. ;)

As a sidenote to those you could argue: "But an Open Source Project like Inkscape is able to open CDR". => You can open (never tested) CDR up to version X4 which was released in 2008 or so. Perhaps Corel locked the format a bit tighter? Who knows.

------
Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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Yeah, a lot of programs which open CorelDRAW files open really old versions only.  That's typically not a problem in practice for applications like vinyl cutting or embroidery design (two niches where CorelDRAW is the dominant app).  But you do have to explicitly "save as" in CorelDRAW using a version that your partner/vendor can handle.

I should say that version X4 (14) is fairly comprehensive in features.  By "really old", I meant something like version 5.

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16 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

"...IMO Serif should concentrate on all open or non-locked or best documented formats to make them work without problems..."

Like Adobe's most-proprietary-of-all formats and methods and naming conventions, I suppose?

IMO, Corel, like Adobe, 'own' certain industries, and the only way to gain market share is to be better, and work with their content. Eventually, new content will be developed on Affinity, and content collections will use the Affinity format(s).

I've used Corel Draw Graphics Suite since 2.01 (skipping some versions along the way, but owning most), and would like to switch to a better integrated suite, but haven't found it yet, because it will need Corel support. Designer Publisher seem promising, but you can't walk away from decades of content and service providers with workflows using Corel. If you've got a significantly better suite, you can still 'win' in the long run, but it will take 15+ years instead of five to do so. It's a business decision, and it seems 15+ years for this market is desirable for Affinity. I wish it was otherwise, but they can make their priorities.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hello All.
Im not good with english so use my original lanquage and translate, so sorry for that, and thanks for help, and any sugestions.
Oryginal language (PL/POL). Dołączam się do prośby o dobrze działający system importu i exportu plików z programu CorelDRAW.
Jestem osobą prywatną z planami by zarabiać, jednak pewne projekty mam w CorelDRAW x8 i kosztowały mnie sporo czasu. Jednak namyślając się czy płacić 2400zł za nowszy program, który wprowadza mało rozwiązań, przeważyło nad decyzją o daniu szansy i wsparcia finansowo Affinity. Wiem ze program się rozwija, ale byłbym wdzięczny o dopracowanie tego szczegółu. EPS Nie robi tego tragicznie, ale jednak nie wszystko działa ok. Dziękuję.
Translate from google (EN/ENG). I join the request for a well-functioning system for importing and exporting files from CorelDRAW.
I am a private person with plans to earn money, but I have some projects in CorelDRAW x8 and they cost me a lot of time. However, considering whether to pay PLN 2,400 for a newer program that introduces few solutions, it prevailed over the decision to give Affinity a chance and financially support it. I know that the program is developing, but I would be grateful to refine this detail. EPS It doesn't do it tragically, but not everything works fine. Thank you.

Edited by DominicD
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