While this post will talk specifically about printing an envelope, it can easily be modified to work with other specialty paper sizes. For a company that is focused around various types of design, it always drove us a little crazy to hand write envelopes. We’ve tried various solutions over the years, but none of them seemed ideal. Now we have a solution that works great and this post will describe how it was accomplished.

First, we selected the “Envelope #10” size in CorelDRAW as that was the size of envelope we wanted to print. A little experimentation was required to determine what areas of the envelope were not printable. This turned out to be around .25 inches on top/bottom and closer to .5 inches on the left edge.

Below is a graphic showing the template we created. While our template was designed to manually change the address, you could use merge fields with CorelDRAW’s Print Merge feature to do batches of envelopes.

The biggest setting change comes when it is time to print and the setting is very printer dependent so you’ll have to determine what settings works on your printer. First, select the correct printer in the CorelDRAW Print dialog box and then press the Preferences button to get to the dialog for your printer. Below is the dialog for our Brother ink jet printer used for envelopes.

It is very important that we changed the paper size to COM-10 (for a #10 Envelope) and Landscape orientation. Obviously we also needed to have envelopes loaded into the printer. If you’re curious about how it will look, use CorelDRAW’s Print Preview before you print. When ready, print it!