A few days ago someone has utilized the Hire the Geek service so they could learn why some of their CorelDRAW files were so large. Each of the sample files provided included several bitmaps.

Once the files were built, they were to be output as 1280 x 720 pixels for a variety of usages. After a quick look at the files, it was obvious they had included more bitmap than was needed for their desired output. On the status bar at the bottom of CorelDRAW, I saw the following on one of the bitmaps I selected.

Rarely is it ever a good thing to see more than 300 dpi and often having 150-200 dpi is more than enough. Since this bitmap is 1576 dpi, it was pretty obvious that it had more data than was needed. Then I looked at the object properties and saw the following.

As the selected bitmap took up less than half the width of the page, the width of 5868 pixels was about ten times what was needed. The simple answer is to open each bitmap in Corel PHOTO-PAINT (or another bitmap editor) and use the Image | Resample command to shrink the bitmap to a more appropriate size.

Since we know they output their files at 1280 pixels wide, never should any bitmap be imported that is more than 1280 pixels wide. After this simple change, the size of their CorelDRAW files was reduced dramatically.