CorelDRAW X4 or Planet Google

CorelDRAW X4: The Official Guide

Author: Gary David Bouton

The Only Corel-Authorized Guide to CorelDRAW X4

Create fine art and commercial graphics with one powerful tool! CorelDRAW X4: The Official Guide shows you how to get a visual message across with impact and style; edit photos; build captivating layouts; and compose scenes in a clean, attention-getting style. Learn how to illustrate like the pros, justify and flow text around shapes, and truly understand digital color. You'll also discover how to create 3D objects, apply special effects, and integrate different media to build outstanding graphics. Packed with expert tips and techniques for creating professional-level art, this is your one-stop CorelDRAW X4 resource.

• Create drawings that mimic traditional oils and acrylics using Artistic Media, Smudge, and Roughen brushes
• Lay out complete page designs with layers, multi-page options, and preset page and label templates
• Import and format text, flow text around illustrations, and add drop caps
• Use CorelDRAW as a desktop publishing program
• Import and edit digital photos, including camera RAW files, and incorporate them into your designs
• Add special effects to your illustrations including dynamic lens effects and transparency
• Create 3D objects with the Extrude tool

Includes an all-new 8-page full-color section

 

Gary David Bouton has used CorelDRAW professionally for more than 15 years and is the author of five books covering previous versions. He was a 1992 finalist in the CorelDRAW World Design Contest. A former advertising agency art director, Gary has received four international awards in design and desktoppublishing and has written several guides on digital graphics covering the fields of photography, special effects, video editing, and 3D modeling.

Table of Contents:

Pt. I CorelDRAW X4 Quick Start Guide

1 What's New in CorelDRAW X4? 3

2 Exploring Your Workspace 17

3 Examining the Palettes, Cruising the Menus 37

4 The X4 Test Drive 71

Pt. II Getting Started with CorelDRAW X4

5 Working with Single- and Multi-Page Documents 97

6 Measuring and Drawing Helpers 117

7 Views, Zooming, Navigating Your Work 149

8 Moving, Scaling, Rotating: Basic Transformations 167

Pt. III Working with Object Tools

9 Creating Basic Shapes 191

10 Using the Pen Tools 217

11 Editing Objects 251

12 Arranging and Organizing Objects 275

Pt. IV Working with Text

13 Typography Rules and Conventions 321

14 Working with Text 345

15 Creating Your Own Font 381

16 Getting Your Words Perfect 407

Pt. V Attributes for Objects and Lines

17 Filling Objects 437

18 Outline Attributes 471

19 Digital Color Theory Put to Practice 491

Pt. VI Creating Special Effects

20 Envelope and Distortion Effects 525

21 Blends and Contours 551

22 Lens Effects and Transparency 589

23 Embellishments: Bevels, PowerClips, and Shadows 623

Pt. VII Creating the Illusion of 3D Objects

24 Working with Perspective 653

25 Extruding Objects 667

Pt. VIII Thinking Outside the (Tool)Box

26 Bitmap Boot Camp: Working with Photographs 697

27 Image-ination: Advanced Photography Techniques 723

28 Printing: Professional Output 753

29 Basic HTML Page Layout and Publishing 795

30 Automating Tasks and Visual Basic for Applications 827

Appendix: Shortcut Keys 855

Index 865

Read also Lovers Massage Kit or Reiki for Dummies

Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know

Author: Randall Stross

Based on unprecedented access he received to the highly secretive "Googleplex," acclaimed New York Times columnist Randall Stross takes readers deep inside Google, the most important, most innovative, and most ambitious company of the Internet Age. His revelations demystify the strategy behind the company's recent flurry of bold moves, all driven by the pursuit of a business plan unlike any other: to become the indispensable gatekeeper of all the world's information, the one-stop destination for all our information needs. Will Google succeed? And what are the implications of a single company commanding so much information and knowing so much about us?

As ambitious as Google's goal is, with 68 percent of all Web searches (and growing), profits that are the envy of the business world, and a surplus of talent, the company is, Stross shows, well along the way to fulfilling its ambition, becoming as dominant a force on the Web as Microsoft became on the PC. Google isn't just a superior search service anymore. In recent years it has launched a dizzying array of new services and advanced into whole new businesses, from the introductions of its controversial Book Search and the irresistible Google Earth, to bidding for a slice of the wireless-phone spectrum and nonchalantly purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Google has also taken direct aim at Microsoft's core business, offering free e-mail and software from word processing to spreadsheets and calendars, pushing a transformative -- and highly disruptive -- concept known as "cloud computing." According to this plan, users will increasingly store all of their data on Google's massive servers -- a network of a million computers that amounts to the world's largest supercomputer, with unlimited capacity to house all the information Google seeks.

The more offerings Google adds, and the more ubiquitous a presence it becomes, the more dependent its users become on its services and the more information they contribute to its uniquely comprehensive collection of data. Will Google stay true to its famous "Don't Be Evil" mantra, using its power in its customers' best interests?

Stross's access to those who have spearheaded so many of Google's new initiatives, his penetrating research into the company's strategy, and his gift for lively storytelling produce an entertaining, deeply informed, and provocative examination of the company's audacious vision for the future and the consequences not only for the business world, but for our culture at large.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

In this spellbinding behind-the-scenes look at Google, New York Times columnist Stross (The Microsoft Way) provides an intimate portrait of the company's massively ambitious aim to "organize the world's information." Drawing on extensive interviews with top management and the author's astonishingly open access to the famed Googleplex, Stross leads readers through Google's evolution from its humble beginnings as the decidedly nonbusiness-oriented brainchild of Stanford Ph.D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, through the company's early growing pains and multiple acquisitions, on to its current position as global digital behemoth. Tech lovers will devour the pages of discussion about the Algorithm; business folk will enjoy the accounts of how company after company, including Microsoft and Yahoo, underestimated Google's technology, advertising model and ability to solve problems like scanning library collections; and general readers will find the sheer scale and scope of Google's progress in just a decade astounding. The unfolding narrative of Google's journey reads like a suspense novel. Brin, Page and CEO Eric Schmidt battle competitors and struggle to emerge victorious in their quest to index all the information in the world.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Caroline Geck - Library Journal

Stross ("Digital Domain" columnist, New York Times; The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World) here gives us an outstanding business history of Google from its humble beginnings through the dot-com era to current times. Although the term Google often elicits good vibes from individuals of all ages, genders, and lifestyles worldwide, Stross shows how Google's current goals are not entirely altruistic. In fact, Google is a formidable business enterprise that uses its vast advertising revenues to achieve market share and to attain advantage over competitors, such as Facebook, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Google's underlying strength lies in the proprietary software algorithm behind its search engine that becomes smarter when users click to web page results. Google is venturing in many new directions to accomplish the founders' goal of organizing the planet's information, but its initiatives are usually hit or miss, and its current emphasis is on automated processes that are easily "scalable" rather than investments that rely on human capital. Stross explains all of this in a balanced portrait, including criticisms concerning copyright, privacy, and other ethical issues. Therefore, his book is recommended for all business collections, both public and academic.

Kirkus Reviews

Yes, the Googleplex is trying to take over the world, but in the end this vaunted company is just as fallible as the others. In his just-the-facts account, New York Times columnist Stross (Business/San Jose State Univ.; The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, 2007, etc.) assumes a judicious tone, avoiding the common extremes of either enthusing with childlike mania about the wonders of Google and its products, or expressing wild-eyed fear of its octopus-like reach in information gathering. This considered approach, combined with the author's relatively dry writing style, doesn't make for thrilling reading. The lack of any evident overarching thesis may also bother some readers, though perhaps not those whose knowledge of the organization doesn't extend much beyond the Web page they access daily. Stross paints a credible portrait of a company that, at least for a time, seemed poised to be the left-field candidate to supplant Microsoft as the most important technology purveyor in the world. The author comes at his subject elliptically, in chapters gathered thematically instead of chronologically, to discuss Google's brilliantly simple approach to its mammoth needs for storage capacity (lots of cheap servers networked together by themselves instead of the more expensive industry standard servers) or the paradigm-changing nature of its search software (known within the company simply as "The Algorithm"). Stross earns points by not fawning over the cuter aspects of Google culture that usually entrance journalists. Also, instead of attacking it for attempting world domination, he picks apart such missteps as the problem-plagued book-scanning program and earlymistakes with Gmail. In the end, the author suggests, the vaunted wizards of information could turn out to just be the next Microsoft. Occasionally pedestrian but always interesting take on the organization that simply wants to organize the world's information . . . all of it.