H2Ohydrographics

Need help with getting an outline for several items grouped together

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I am a beginner, using corel draw and graphtec plotter. I am making cups and water bottles for my son's baseball/football team and i am running into a problem, i am sure it is staring me right in the face, ugh! Please see attached photo.

My question/problem: I've been using my contour tool to get outlines around the word baseball/football and around aunt, Grammy or whatever term of endearment, and also around baseball/football, each on their own. how do I get an outline after grouping all 3 together? After I group them, my contour/apply is greyed out. I want to put a black background around all 3 to make it pop? Does that make sense? (Kinda like the baseball mom cup but I want a thicker outline) poor football cups need some help, look lame.

Thank u so much in advance for your help, hope my question makes sense!

post-34900-0-89555400-1380066932_thumb.j

post-34900-0-64160600-1380067546_thumb.j

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Select the items you want to contour around.

 

Go to the Arrange menu and select Shaping > Boundary.

Nothing obvious will happen, however it creates a new curve that matches the outline of your selected shapes if they were all welded together.  Click on a color in  your palette to give it a fill and send it to the back, and then apply your contour to that curve.  Voila!

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Select the items you want to contour around.

 

Go to the Arrange menu and select Shaping > Boundary.

Nothing obvious will happen, however it creates a new curve that matches the outline of your selected shapes if they were all welded together.  Click on a color in  your palette to give it a fill and send it to the back, and then apply your contour to that curve.  Voila!

I wish you had posted that last week before I did it the hard way. I'll have to try it later today. Thanks, OW

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What version of Corel you have OW? I don't see that option in X3 

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What version of Corel you have OW? I don't see that option in X3 

 

I'm using CorelDraw X6, didn't realize it was a new feature...  :-\

 

 

Thank you so very much, can't wait to try it tomorrow! How's the weather in Iowa?

 

Decent - it's still warm enough that it feels like late summer, but not so warm that it's "hot".  Leaves are just starting to turn colors on some trees.   It's currently 76° and sunny!

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Y'all just trying to make me upgrade aren't ya? Must be gettin a kickback from Corel. Actually sucks because that is something I have a use for :'(

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I tried it and ended up having to manually move all the nodes of the boundry to make it work on a word. When it made it, it was same size as existing word, then resizing it just made it as id I made the text line larger and no longer was an outline. I couldnt find anywhere it would let me pick an outline size

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Could you not also group everything, duplicate it, then weld/merge all the items, send it to bottom layer and expand to the desired size?

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Okay, I also have corel drawx3 and this wasn't an option under arrange, but kept thinking about what OW Jones said about boundary. So after doing just a little searching, I found it! Select all your objects, Go to effects, then create boundary. Then I selected my boundary and applied a contour to it. Yippee! I am so excited! Thank u ow jones for getting me on the right track, hope this helps someone else.

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Could you not also group everything, duplicate it, then weld/merge all the items, send it to bottom layer and expand to the desired size?

 

Yes, that's just extra steps to get to the same goal - Arrange > Shaping > Boundary gives you the same thing as Edit > Copy, Edit > Paste, Arrange > Shaping > Weld.

 

It also drops any fill effects, so if you're working with patterned fills, gradients, etc. (for doing print work), it doesn't try to replicate those and further bog down your system.

 

Expanding to the desired size is not the same effect as applying a contour.

 

In this top example, I applied a red contour to black text.

 

In the bottom example, I duplicated the text, set it to red, moved it to back and enlarged it - you can see that it no longer lines up with the original text...

 

post-24492-0-76804800-1380146082_thumb.j

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I selected all the text (3 lines in my case) and welded them, then I went to interactive contour and just outlined and adjusted to the size I needed. This is the first time I did more that 1 line at a time and it worked fine. By increasing the outline I managed to get all 3 lines into a sort of bubble.

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The only way I've found so far is the method I mentioned earlier about grouping, duplicating, merging/welding/union, and expanding.

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