I had a loyal reader contact me recently. When trying to blend lines, the result wasn’t as desired. An exaggerated version of the result is shown at near right while the desired result is shown at far right.

Now this problem isn’t limited to blending lines in CorelDRAW, it can happen to any shapes you’ve used for a blend. What is happening is that the nodes are out of whack. Sometimes you’ll do this on purpose to get a particular effect, while other times you will only be frustrated by the unexpected result.

The good news is that CorelDRAW has had a feature since the earliest versions called “Map Nodes” that allows you to easily control which nodes on each control object are mapped to each other. Even better is that the user asking the question had a copy of my CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed book so it was easy for me to point them to pages 352-3 and the associated tutorial video to get the step-by-step details for solving the problem. It is really as using as choosing the Map Nodes option from the Blend Docker or Property Bar.

Now let’s talk about your time. For this user, it only took a couple of minutes to e-mail the details of the problem and get an answer where I could specifically point them to both written and video instructions with a solution. Unfortunately there is not enough time in the day for me to write out those instructions so it is great when I can point you to the specific pages/videos like I did with this question. Of course there are many things you can learn without even asking. So please consider getting a copy of CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed or the one that represents the version you have so you can get problems solved and crank out more projects!