Apart from matching entire paragraph styles in your web-to-print templates, you can also control the style, font, size and position of each character in a text frame individually. This feature gives you many new options to design variable text fields in web-to-print templates.

Example

Let’s say you want to design some typography template where each letter of the word or sentence has a different font, size, rotation angle etc.

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To achieve this you simply need to select your dummy text and activate CorelDRAW Pick Tool. You should see small squares near the bottom-left corner of each character.

Click on and drag that square to change the characters position.

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Apart from changing the position, there are also some other options visible in the top properties bar of the Pick tool while you have a character selected. Use them to rotate, change the font, size, style etc. to the selected character.

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We assigned a different font to each of the characters in the dummy text and played with their size and rotation.

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If we turn this dummy text into a simple variable text field the system will discard the individual character formatting properties and process user input as plain text.

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To instruct the system to retain each characters setting when replacing the dummy text with the user input, you simply need to add “~” symbol at the end of the object name.

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The user input will now match each character formatting from the template file.

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Try this dynamic imaging template.

Download the FREE CorelDRAW template file used in this example.

Download the Snap ITC, Cheap Ink killed my Printer, Broadway, Forte, Cooper Black, BellBottom Laser, Bauhaus 93 and Eraser fonts used in the template.

Linked text frames

Although this feature can help you edit characters individually, it doesn’t let you assign special effects to each of them. To achieve this, you will have to link Artistic text frames.

Things to consider

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Our web-to-print system matches character formatting for as many characters as you have in your template file. If your template contains a four letter word and the user inputs a longer string of text, the extra characters will retain the style of the last one.

To avoid this, try to fill the dummy text frame to the max or restrict the user input to the max number of characters in the web-to-print Field Editor.