I’m sure you’ve all heard of the story of the man who went to the doctor and said “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor responds “Don’t do that!” So why is it that software users will continually do the thing that “hurts” over and over again. Except in the world of software, we are most likely talking about extreme slowness, crashing and/or file corruption. Time for me to scrub up and give you some doctorly advice.

I will say this over and over until everyone understands clearly. CorelDRAW is not the right software for creating long documents! If you are even the least bit unsure about this, go back and read this paragraph again and again until it is clear.

Now some of you will say that it works for you. While it may work, you may not realize how poorly it is working compared to alternative software. Others will say that Corel gives you the features, so why not use them. Of course I hear the excuse about cost and learning curve quite often.

Let’s go over some of the problems you may face. The more text you have in a document, the slower it will get. Combine that with way too many fonts (Managing Fonts Can Speed Up CorelDRAW) and it will feel like you are watching paint dry. Slow performance is bad, but you may also find that your files will crash. By far the worst problem is that the document will become corrupt. Once it is corrupt, your chances of recovering the file are very slim (Recovering Corrupt CorelDRAW Files).

To avoid these problems, just keep your documents to a reasonable number of pages. In Break Up Long Documents, I suggested no more than 10-12 pages per file. This benefits you in more than one way. First, it speeds up the file dramatically. Second, it helps you should a file become corrupt. Instead of losing the entire document and needing to re-create it, you’ll only need to create the section in the bad file.

Now some of you will be frustrated because your goal is to end up with a single file. You can easily combine multiple files when printing or publishing to PDF. I covered this is Combine Multiple CDR Files Into PDF or Print.

Long documents full of text aren’t the only problem. When those files are full of graphics, the size of the file can be quite large. By breaking up those files, you can keep their size a more manageable size. This was something I covered in Don’t Create Massive CorelDRAW Files!

Now it is time for you to make a choice. You can continue to do the things that cause problems and it will bite you badly at some point. A better choice would be to listen to my doctorly advice and have a much more pleasant experience.