I had a loyal reader ask me about an article titled Fun with glyphs at Before & After. It shows how a variety of alternate glyphs are selected from a font. The reader wanted to know if this was possible in CorelDRAW. The short answer is yes and it has been around for a very long time. I covered it in a tutorial several years ago titled CorelDRAW and Special Characters.

Unfortunately there is a longer answer and it opens a few holes. First, you have to have a font that has the alternate characters. Of the fonts Corel supplies, none of them have alternates to the extent of those described in the article. Not even close.

Even more frustrating that CorelDRAW (through X5) does not support the full OpenType character set. So even if you have a font with all the cool alternate characters, you won’t be able to use many of them. This is especially problematic for users in countries that use languages with a large alphabet and/or a number of accented characters.

Corel is well aware of this limitation and I’m sure it is something they have on a to-do list for future versions. My guess is that it would require a total revamp of all things text in CorelDRAW and thus it would be a major undertaking. We can only cross our fingers and hope it is something they do sooner rather than later.