Corel Draw (cdr) to anything edittable.

[Henry Hartley]

On Fri, 04 March 2005 at 10:00 AM, P Jones said:
>> 
>> On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 07:39:23 -0700, Robin Laing wrote:
>> > Has anyone come across a solution other than the obvious, find
>> > a Windows computer, find a copy of Corel Draw and install Corel
>> > Draw?
>> 
>> If you find anything on this please let the list know (or at least
>> me ;-) ). I've looked for years for a linux solution to CDR files,
>> and have never found anything. I have several hundred CDR files
>> that I'd like to convert, and the only solution I've come up with
>> is a file by file conversion to some other format (WMF or CGM)
>> from within a Win/CorelDRAW installation.

This isn't a Linux solution to the problem but in situations like this,
ANY solution is better than none.  There are other packages that can
read CDR files besides CorelDRAW.  I have Adobe Illustrator 10 on a
Windows computer and it shows CDR as one of the file types it can read.
I don't have any CDR files to test it on so I cannot vouch for how well
it will handle complex drawings.

Adobe has a free, 30-day "Adobe Illustrator CS Tryout" that you can
download and use it to convert your files.  You have to register with
Adobe but there is no requirement that the information you put in their
form be accurate.  So, all you have to dig up is a Windows machine and
they seem to be about, here and there.

Illustrator CS can save to a half dozen or so formats and can export to
a few others.  SVG is an option although the quick test I made with an
Illustrator file made a complete hash of it.  It may take a bit of
fiddling to come up with something that gives you what you want but the
sooner you get these old files out of CDR format and into something a
bit more accessible, the better off you'll be.  If you just need to save
them for printing, you could convert them to postscript or tiff or any
number of other formats.

For that matter, Inkscape lists AI (Adobe Illustrator) as one of the
formats it can open.  I wasn't able to open either Illustrator 10 or
Illustrator CS files, however so that may not be any help to you.

-- 
Henry