One of the great things about being at a trade show is talking to all the people who visit the booth and solving the problems they are having. Some of the solutions require a detailed solution while others are quite simple.

A woman visited the booth and her goal was to use text to cut a hole into the middle of a heart shape. Someone had told her the Weld command in CorelDRAW was the answer and it wasn’t working for her. Below are the two objects involved in this operation.

It is a very simple project with only two objects involved. The key is that she was told that Weld was the answer when in fact it wouldn’t work at all for this scenario. I repeated the project using three different commands to get the results shown below.

The example on the left used the Weld command in CorelDRAW. When you have two objects and Weld them, the outermost outline wins. Since all of the text was inside of the heart, the text is basically throw out and the result is the outline of the heart only. If you were to look at the Wireframe view, the text is completely gone.

For the example in the middle, I used the Combine command (Ctrl + L) and it is the best choice for this example. The shape of the text was cut from the heart and is a transparent window to anything behind it.

Another potential solution is the Trim command. It does cut the shape of the text from the heart, but it leaves the original text behind by default. Just so you could see the cutout, I moved the original text up after using the Trim command. So Trim also works, it just takes an extra step.

In CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed, I explore each of these commands in-depth so you’ll know which command to use in any given situation. If you don’t already have a copy, get one now so that you don’t find yourself frustrated using the wrong feature.