How to edit Corel file .cdr in InDesign?

[athanasiosg22473412]

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

[BobLevine]

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.

[athanasiosg22473412]

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?

[Test Screen Name]

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.

[athanasiosg22473412]

 ...it's its own world.... seems like 🙂 

Keeping a CDR license, we thought about it, but decided to rebuild in InDesign, not at least as if I don´t know the program at all. And the time it will take to learn CDR, I can rebuild the files, more easy ( I hope).

[Luke_Jennings]

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/

[athanasiosg22473412]

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]

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.