Linked text frames in a web-to-print template allow you to merge multiple text frames into a single input field. This feature allows you to break apart a single input field. The rules for artistic and paragraph text frames are different.

Linked paragraph text frames

Web-to-print templates with large amounts of text, such as leaflets, ads and other web-to-print documents can benefit from CorelDRAW linked paragraph frames. Only the first paragraph frame needs to be marked as a text field. If the user input cannot fit into the first frame it flows into the second and so on.

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Paragraph frames have some limitations in terms of types of transformations you may need for creative web-to-print designs. They are more suited for large bodies of plain text.

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To link paragraph text frames you need to arrange them in the correct order in the Object Manager (Window/Dockers/Object Manager), select all of them starting from the last one and go to Text/Paragraph Text Frame/Link in the top menu.

Linked artistic text frames

Artistic text frames allow great flexibility and can be transformed almost in any way imaginable. Linking them together creates a single text field for web-to-print users that is breaking apart in formatting. Every text frame can have its own formatting, position, etc.

Example

Let’s say you have a design in mind that requires parts of a sentence (or each letter of a word) to have different effects or settings assigned to it. In most cases, the condition for this to happen is to have separate text frames.

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Here we have a sentence with a different Envelope applied to each of its segments.

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Instead of making it hard on the users by forcing them to input each segment of the sentence into a separate input field, we can merge all those text fields into a single one.

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To achieve this, you need to add .# (# is the field order number) at the end of each object name.

Example

• Text.1
• Text.2
• Text.3

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The text before the dot (.) is what will appear as the input field name after you’ve uploaded the template.
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The dot and order number (.1 .2 etc.) will not be visible once you’ve uploaded your template and are required so that the system knows the order of the text frames.

This can also come in handy if we want to layer the objects in a different way. The system recognizes the objects order by their number and not by their position in the Object Manager as usual.

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This allows you to re-position the objects as needed for the design.

As you can see, the second segment of the sentence is sitting on top of the first one but the system ignores that and follows the number in the objects name.

Try this dynamic imaging template.

Download the FREE CorelDRAW template file used in this example.

Restrictions

The downside of using this feature for “single character” text frames is that you limit the user to a specific length for the word. Even if the user inputs a longer word, the system will only show the number of characters that you have in the template. Limit the length of user input through web-to-print Field Editor.