8 Ways to Sunday

A quick tip for those who’d like to use these two great programs together: don’t.

Over the weekend I was working on a design in CorelDRAW that featured a pencil sketch. I wanted to keep the file size of my final PDF output reasonable, so I had used Macromedia Fireworks to optimize the sketch, bringing it down to 32 shades of gray without any visible effect on its quality. Unfortunately, Draw kept crashing once I’d inserted the image into my design. It didn’t matter whether I saved the file as PNG, TIFF, or GIF — Draw always crashed. Once I changed to a full-color TIFF saved from Photoshop Elements, there were no further problems.

I don’t know if Fireworks inserts some funky metadata into the files it saves, or if the fault lies with CorelDRAW, but the two just don’t seem to get along. Perhaps a future patch to one program or the other will fix the problem.