Technical Library: Using CorelDRAW's Align and Distribute Menus

With CorelDRAW's align and distribute tools, you can precisely align the images and text in your engravings and distribute objects evenly across the page. This tutorial will give you a few important tips on using these tools so you can set up professional images quickly and easily for your next engraving project.

We are going to start out with a page set up with 5 stars drawn on it. Each one has been drawn relatively close to a straight line, but for this exercise we are going to use the Align and Distribute menus to make sure they are positioned at exactly the same height across the page.

2)

First, marquee select all of the stars by drawing a box around them using the Pick tool (the arrow at the top of the tool bar). In the menu bar, select Arrange, Align and Distribute, Align and Distribute. A menu will appear with an Align Tab and a Distribute Tab. You can see the Align tab below.

3)

On the Align tab you will see a series of boxes you can check based on where you want the objects to align. On the left side of the menu you can choose to align all of the selected objects to the top, center, or bottom of the objects.

Along the top of the page you will see check boxes to align the stars to the left, center, or right of the objects.

4)

The object used to align the left, right, top, or bottom edges is determined by the order of creation or order of selection of the stars. If you marquee select the stars before you align them, the first object created will be used. If you select the objects one at a time the last object selected will be the reference point for aligning the others.

For this example, we want to align the starts to the top of the stars. When we click the box next to Top and click Apply, we can see the stars in the background all line up evenly at the top of the first star we created.

We could also use the selection boxes in the center of the menu to choose to align to:

The next thing we want to fix is to evenly space the stars across the five objects, so click on Distribute tab at the top of the menu.

When you click on the Distribute tab, you will see a series of check boxes to choose from. On the left side of the page you can choose to distribute the items evenly vertically between the top of each item,

We want to distribute the stars evenly horizontally, so we will check the box next to spacing to distribute the stars evenly based on the spacing between each star. We also can check next to either Extent of Selection or Extent of Page. Below you can see what each selection does to the stars we have selected:

Do you know that when you have any number of objects selected in Corel you can perform simple alignment functions with one simple keystroke?  You don't have to open any menus and you just have to press one key for any of the primary Align functions!    Here's how it works: Create a drawing in Corel and place a couple of objects on the page.  Select the objects that you want to align and simply type the letter (as long as you aren't in Text mode) associated with the primary alignment function.  The selected objects will be aligned according to which letter is used.  For example:  Select one object on your Corel page and the press the P key.  That object will automatically move to the center of the page with that single key stroke.

How do you know which letter performs which function?  Go to the menu bar and click on Arrange, then click on Align and Distribute.  You will get the fly out below.  Notice that the primary alignment functions have a hot key letter assigned to them (L for Align Left, etc.).  Luckily, most of the letters are the most intuitive (these hot keys aren't case sensitive, which makes it even easier!).  Once you remember which letters are associated with which function, you will be just one keystroke away from alignment happiness.