Bulk change colors in Corel X3?

[Ed Lang]

Is there a quick and easy way to change line colors in Corel X3?

I have many files that are setup for cutting, but the order in which they cut/engrave is not what I want. I would like to change say all black lines to be blue and all red lines to be black. So far I have been clicking on each line and then changing the color. There has got to be a quicker way!

I want to engrave my parts before they cut out and my ULS cuts in the order of black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, orange. Epilog and the older ULS drivers go in a different color order I think.

thanks folks

ed

[Mike Hood]

Easiest way would be a script.

Have you ever written one, or can I help?

[Rodne Gold]

Its very easy , all you do is go to edit/find and replace/find objects
This has EXTREMELY powerful filtering capabilites in corel
All you do then Click "begin search"

Then using the tabs , navigate to the outline tab
and click "outline properties" and "next"

Then click the "colour" button and using the palettes , select the color you want to change , lets say red.
Click "next" , then "finish" and it will have a button bar with "find all" displayed , click it
Corel will then select and find ALL objects with a red outline and you can group em and change their colour with selecting the colour you want from the palette and right clicking.

The search is powerful , you could for example have selected all objects with a fountain fill with the outline red on layer 3 or whatever.

Be careful with colours as what you think may be red might be corel "red" , might be a R100 , G, B and not a cmky or spot colour , so click on one "red" object and look at what colour corel says it is , and use THAT in your search and find criteria.
It will also ungroup objects that match your search criteria, IE it will find entities within grouped objects.
If you do this a lot , save the search like under a name of "find all red lines" and then you dont have to go thru all the menus and steps. You just load the search.
Very nice usage to change RGB colours to cmyk or whatever , often importing stuff has wierd color swaps happening and what should engrave doesnt cos it doesnt match a laser colour.
Hope this helps

[Lee DeRaud]

What Mike said.

Basically you need a VBA program that tranverses the object list, looks at each object, and performs the desired operation on the appropriate objects. I think the CorelDraw VBA programming guide has an example of something very similar to what you need, but you'll have to add a front-end dialog to select the 'from' and 'to' colors.

Edit: and while I was off looking for that stupid programming guide PDF file, Rodne came up with a simpler way...never mind.

[Shaddy Dedmore]

I'd do the search/replace like Rodne suggests, but remember to use an intermediate color. As in, lets say you had red and black. If you changed all the red to black, then all the black to red... you now have 100% red lines. So you'll first have to change all the red to say yellow, then the black to red, then the yellow to black.

Shaddy