A user asks: “I’m trying to import a file that was drawn in Autocad. The import looks good, however, none of the objects are “complete” objects. For example, a square is actually 4 line segments, and not a completed square. I can’t figure out a way to close the objects. Any suggestions?”
Jeff: try this:
- click virtual segment delete tool
- hold shift
- draw box around the four lines as a test
- fill box with a color to see if it’s really a closed box now
User: “holy *!!* it worked. hours of saving as multiple file formats has ended. now, please tell me what just happened. LOL”
Jeff: It’s a secret power of that tool that maybe 20 people on Earth know about. You’re student #21. 🙂
User: Thank you very much for sharing this! Wow, that feature really ranks low for “discoverability”.
That will be incredibly useful for some of the stuff that I (and others with whom I work) need to deal with on occasion. Specifically, I’m thinking about data from scientific instruments, essentially the sort of “trace” that might have been produced by a chart recorder back in the day, e.g., how the value of Y varies as a function of X. Sometimes this stuff comes into CorelDraw not as many-noded curves, but as a collection of straight line segments (it depends on the nature of the source).
For example, I have 360 objects in CorelDraw, and that’s content that I clipped out of something more complicated (>1200 objects).
When I simply combine them to make it easier to handle and to get easy access to outline properties, it becomes a curve with 720 nodes on 360 subpaths.
If I instead use your method – VSD tool +Shift – then it becomes a curve with 361 nodes. Much better!
Jeff: If you need to close shapes with more of a gap, consider the CorelDRAW menu item: Arrange|Join Curves
See an animation showing both ways:
