A user sent a CorelDRAW file a few days ago that was an absolute mess. I never did hear the origin of the file, but I’m guessing it must have come from some flavor of CAD file. It contained only 660 objects, but there were 680,000 nodes. One “object” appeared to be a circle. Yet it was made up of 559 subpaths loaded with 6368 nodes. As this object was truly nothing but a circle, you could easily draw a circle of the exact same size and align the two objects. Then delete the awful one! Inside of that circle were five more circles that were almost as much of a mess. This series of circles was then repeated six times on the page. Page 2 had sixteen sets of the same awful circles. I could go on and on.

Since I suspect this file came from a CAD file, I must emphasize that you need to go through extra steps to important CAD files successfully. In April, I wrote Importing AutoCAD Files Into CorelDRAW with several suggested workflows.

There are also macros that can help tremendously with the clean up. One of the most important comes as part of Jeff’s Sooper Dooper Must Have Macros and will reduce the number of nodes on all objects in a file with a single click.

The destination for this file was to be a CNC router. All of the nodes in the file are nothing short of disaster for that type of output. Even if the file was clean, exporting directly to DXF from CorelDRAW would not give good results. That is exactly why DXFTool Professional Edition was created. Since this file also repeated a number of the same shapes in a “nested” fashion, it would be much easier to use a macro like GDG Nest to do the nesting automatically.

Take advantage of the many macros that exist as they can often save you many hours of frustration, maybe even hundreds of hours for files like this!