Combine and fill in Corel 11

[Richard Rumancik]

My "combine and fill technique" suddenly does not seem to work as I expect - is there a switch that has been tripped or what could be wrong?

Procedure:

Draw the Letter "T", convert to curves, no fill, black outline. Draw a rectangle around it. Combine both objects and fill with red. The "T" should be "no fill" and the rest of the box red.

This procedure works fine in Corel 9. But in Corel 11, it fills BOTH the "T" and the box with red. Any ideas what is wrong?

The procedure seems to be working fine with simple shapes and circles so I am puzzled as to what is happening.

[Carl Sewell]

Try reversing the direction (under the shape tool) of the "T" OR the square before combining them. There's an explanation for it, but it's rather involved.

Or, make sure the "T" is in front of the square before you combine them.

[Scott Shepherd]

Yes, what Carl said, simple way, draw the box first, then the "T", or either draw the "T" first and bring it to the front and it should work.

Works on mine when I just tested it. Leaving the T in the back had the same result you did.

[Mike Null]

This is a Corel feature I haven't used. What is the advantage and application?

[Richard Rumancik]

Scott and Carl, thanks for your help. I tried both methods (moving to front and reversing curve direction) and both allowed me to fill. The odd thing is that I never noticed this before when I used it. Now I know how to fix it when it fills incorrectly.

Mike, the reason to use this is to identify what is the "part" and what are "holes in the part". As a simple example, suppose I want to draw a washer (donut). I can draw 2 concentric circles. Now I want to color the donut chocolate brown. I can select the outer circle and fill, but this would cause the inner circle to be colored brown. To fix that I could do a number of things, such as filling the inside with white, playing with front-to-back position, etc. Some fixes can become pretty messy "patches".

But usually the the simplest way is to select the two circles and combine them. Corel will then treat them as one curve, and it will know that the center of the donut is a "hole" and should not be colored. So when I select the combined entity and fill it with color, the donut hole is automatically un-filled.

I use it a lot when I convert text characters to curves and have to break the characters apart for editing such as on a logo. Suppose I want the inside of an A (the triangle) to be a star. I can break the character apart and replace the triangle with a star. Then it can be combined with the outside so it will become one entity and always fill properly.

Today I found the fills weren't always working as expected. If it fails, use Carl's suggestion. Go back to the point where you had two entities (undo fill, undo combine); click on one object, select a node, and select Reverse Curve. Then combine again and the fill should work as described above with the donut. It seems that the technique needs to have both entities drawn CW or CCW for the fill to work. You can't tell on the screen (at least I can't) which direction it is drawn. In some cases you might need to change the object to a curve so you can reverse its direction.

You could also use this if you wanted to laser some text "reverse video" where the characters are un-lasered and the background is lasered to a specific depth.

Although I discovered this small problem today, the work-arounds suggested by Scott and Carl both seemed to work for me during testing.

[Mike Null]

That would be useful.

Thanks for the explanation.