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athanasiosg22473412
New Participant
February 24, 2020
Question

How to edit Corel file .cdr in InDesign?

  • February 24, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 14902 views

Hi Guys,

 

my problem is this: the company I am working for, has some manuals that were created (a long time ago) with Corel Draw. And now I have to make some changes, text and pictures, but I am working with InDesign. The good news: I am able to open the Corel .cdr file, as I installed the free trial from Corel ( for 15 days), and may save in in every file possible/ neccessary... But until now I couldn t find out whats the right way. Maybe it isn t possible at all, but if anyone knows what to do, I will be very thankfull!

 

Greetings, Katharina

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2 replies

Luke Jennings
Luke Jennings
Inspiring
February 24, 2020

Save high-res PDFs from Corel, (you may need to re-size the images in the future). Save a copy of these PDFs. Use the place multipage PDF script to place the PDFs into new InDesign documents, then make your changes in InDesign on a new layer, then open the linked PDF in Acrobat and delete the old element. If there is a likelyhood you will be making extensive changes in the future, you should probably re-create the entire manual in InDesign, using the placed PDFs as a guide.

Or you could download a trial of PDF to InDesign (Recosoft) and see how well that works.

https://www.recosoft.com/products/pdf2id/

 

    A
    athanasiosg22473412Author
    New Participant
    February 25, 2020

    Hey Luke,

    yes indeed, thats the way I tried already before asking here. Even if it is very time consuming, it seems to be the best way to get a full editable result!

    Thanks!

    Colin Flashman
    Colin Flashman
    Community Expert
    February 25, 2020

    There is also a different plugin that performs a similar task: PDF2DTP by Markzware: https://markzware.com/products/pdf2dtp/

    Ultimately, it's a difficult task that is being faced. My way would be to export the corel file to PDF, then use one of the two plug-ins to bring the art into ID and then set aside a lot of time to perform manual cleanup.

    If the answer wasn't in my post, perhaps it might be on my blog at colecandoo!
      BobLevine
      BobLevine
      Community Expert
      February 24, 2020
      Not possible directly. You could, I suppose save as PDF, open in Acrobat, save as Word and then place that resulting mess in InDesign.

      It will need a lot of clean up.
        A
        athanasiosg22473412Author
        New Participant
        February 24, 2020

        Thanks for your suggestion! 

        But I think if I am going to use the "copy/paste method" I could better do this directly from the corel file as I have all the editable texts an embedded images in it... right?

         

        Or is it possible to open the word file directly in indesign with having pages and layers? And then "just" clean up?

        T
        Test Screen Name
        Brainiac
        February 24, 2020

        No, InDesign doesn't make editable documents from other kinds of thing. Like CDR, it's its own world. Copy/paste recovery seems the way forward; or keeping a CDR license for this project. You're certainly making a lot of work, it's likely the cost of conversion is much higher than the cost of the software.

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