From Corel Draw To InDesign

Question

We have received a finished catalog design in CDR format for print from our partner company.

We want to use the same items with a similar design to our catalog. But the issue is that we use Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

We somehow opened the Corel Draw pages in Adobe Illustrator and then placed each into Adobe InDesign, then printed our catalog. On-screen the quality is okay. However, the quality is not what we want in the printed version.

1. Is there any loss of quality? What should we do? Your advice?
2. Is it possible that there is loss in quality becuase of placing each page, into Indesign. What should be the correct way?
3. Is it better to export as Pdf in Corel Draw than edit in Illustrator?

Answer 1

It is impossible to know the specific "quality loss" you are referring to without seeing the files.

Quality is a process, not a thing that you can lose somewhere. So there are several things that can be "broken". Some issues come to my mind that needs to be checked.

• Color profiles.

• Gradients, transparency.

• Fonts, Kerning.

• Embedded bitmaps.

• Clip objects.

• Objects that are now rasterized and should not have.

That way specific issues can be addressed. But it is a complex thing to do, and most of them need to be prepared in Corel Draw, before any export.

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Corel Draw has a bit more editorial capabilities than Illustrator, but less than InDesign, so importing the catalog into Illustrator, will lose some of this capabilities.

The truth is that you need probably to redo your catalog in InDesign. Use some assets, use it as a reference.

Answer 2

Taking something from CDR, placing in AI then placing again in INDD sounds like a recipe for a failed print. The only answer is, to do it right, this needs to be built again in InDesign from scratch. More so if this catalogue needs to be updated in the future, alot easier with a native InDesign build.