Sometimes web-to-print constraints force us to use artistic text frames instead of paragraph text frames (ex. Using text as a PowerClip container). Since our web-to-print auto font resizing option requires overflowing a paragraph text frame, we can’t use this feature with artistic text frames. Here’s a trick explaining how to make artistic text frames resize fonts automatically.

This is a simple web-to-print technique that basically involves enveloping an artistic text frame.

Envelope

Web-to-print Artistic text frames that have an Envelope effect assigned to them will follow certain rules, one of which is that the font will be automatically downsized to fit as if you assigned the auto font resizing option for texts longer than what can fit in the frame. We will use this rule to our advantage.

Lets say we have a variable web-to-print Artistic text frame in our template that is a PowerClip container.

If the user inputs a longer text than the web-to-print field can accommodate the preview will go outside the page border and appear distorted.

Using our web-to-print Field Editor on the site to limit the max number of characters a user is allowed to input, doesn’t cover all angles in this case since we have a multiline text frame. What we really need is the font to downsize when the user text is longer than the placeholder text.

Select the text and activate CorelDRAW’s Envelope tool from the toolbox menu on the left. Drag one (or more) of the nodes just a bit.

We’re only doing this so that the text has an envelope effect assigned to it, not to actually distort/shape the text, which is the main purpose of CorelDRAW Envelope tool.

The user inputted text will be downsized to fit the Envelope.

Download a FREE CorelDRAW template file used in this example.

Things to consider

There are a few things that you should keep in mind when using this font resizing trick:

• This is not actual font resizing because fonts will be stretched and distorted to fit the Envelope, rather than proportionally downscaled as if you changed the font size.
• New lines/paragraphs have to be entered by the user manually – it won’t wrap to a new line.