Corel Draw 8 Create an Array of Objects

How to Align and Position Objects

When creating objects in CorelDRAW, you don't have to rely on just your eyes to place things where you want them. With smart drawing tools like guidelines, alignment and positioning options, and live guides, every object can easily go just where it should.

Click on any of the images below to view full-size.

We'll look at three dockers that have all the options you'll need for aligning and positioning objects.

Guidelines

This business card template has 8 dashed blue lines – these are guidelines.

In the Objects docker, these guidelines are on the Master Page layer, where they can be turned on and off with the Eye icon.

If the guidelines color is hard to see against your document background, you can select them all in the Objects Docker, and right-click on a different color swatch on the Color palette to change their color.

Guidelines Docker

The Guidelines docker is one place where you can create guidelines. The existing ones are listed here: 4 horizontal and 4 vertical.

The Eye icon at the top of the docker can toggle guides on and off. At the top of the docker you can set a different line style and color for new guidelines that will be created.

To place a new horizontal guideline, we set the drop down to Horizontal then enter the Y distance of 0.8" and click Add.

The guideline is created, but isn't quite positioned perfectly where we want it, at the top of the light blue box.

We can select the guideline, change the Y dimensions to 0.855, and click Modify. Now the placement is correct.

Here are more methods of creating new guidelines:

• Select an existing guideline and press Ctrl + D to copy it, then move it by dragging or by entering an exact distance.
• Click and drag from the ruler into the document, and modify placement as needed.
• For an angled guideline, choose that option from the drop down. Create the guide using the default X and Y values, then with that guide still selected, enter an angle and click Modify.

We'll make a copy of this guideline and move it a bit to one side.

You can click on the guideline again to toggle between position and rotate modes. Continue moving and rotating until the guideline is placed correctly.

If you want to be sure your guidelines won't be moved or deleted, you can select them and lock them with the Lock icon in the lower right of the Guidelines docker.

Using Guidelines

For this next section be sure that Snap to Guidelines is enabled. This is the second icon at the top of the docker. Now you can reference guidelines when creating objects. For example, we can use the Pen tool to easily trace this shape along the guidelines.

Custom Guidelines

New in CorelDRAW 2021, any custom guidelines you create are now listed in the Guidelines docker. For example, you can draw an ellipse in a document and then drag it from the page onto the Guides layer in the Objects docker.

In the Guidelines docker, the ellipse appears as a custom guideline, and you can use the icons in the bottom right corner to lock or delete the custom guideline.

World Scale View

When a drawing is created using a scale, guidelines can reflect drawing units or real-world units. In this example, guideline locations are set according to the current drawing units of mm. The drawing scale is 1:175.

To update the drawing units to match the scale, go to Layout > Document Options. On the Rulers tab, click the Edit Scale button at the bottom and enter the custom scale of 1:175.

Once drawing units match the real-world units, you can update the guideline units as well. Click the Options icon at the top right of the Guidelines docker and choose Show at Scale.

Align and Distribute

Next, let's look at the Align and Distribute docker, where a variety of placement options can be found. In this example, the four groups are all selected.

If you want the four selected groups to line up neatly with one another, click Align Center Vertically, or Align Top.

Objects move to align with the last object selected.

To space the groups evenly, try Distribute Center Horizontally, or Distribute Space Horizontally.

Some other useful settings are the Outline option under "Align objects to" in the docker, which aligns grouped objects relative to the group outline, and the Extent of Page option under "Distribute objects to", which distributes selected objects across the page rather than the bounds of the selection.

There are also several other alignment options, such as Page Edge or Page Center, or you can specify an alignment point with the rightmost "Align objects to" option. Using this, you can enter coordinates or click Specify Point to pick a point directly on the document.

With this point set, click Align Bottom to bring all groups down to that horizontal level.

Live Guides

Finally, let's look at the Live Guides docker. When Alignment Guides are enabled, there are several alignment options to choose from, such as Object Edges.

With this option enabled, you can create shapes that align with existing edges.

• With Intelligent Spacing, you can draw a shape spaced exactly between two shapes.
• With Intelligent Dimensioning, you can scale an object and get indicators when a dimension is matched with an existing object.
• Or you can rotate an object to match the same rotation angle as an existing object.

Dynamic Guides

With Dynamic Guides enabled, you can choose the angles to snap to.

As you move the cursor around, the various angled guidelines appear, and you can even use guideline intersections when placing objects.

If you want angles other than the standard ones that appear by default, you can create custom angles with the plus icon.

Corel Draw 8 Create an Array of Objects

Source: https://learn.corel.com/tutorials/how-to-align-and-position-objects-in-coreldraw/

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