CorelDRAW X8 Print Dialog Bug

[Bobby H]

My shop just bought a couple upgrades to CorelDRAW X8, thanks to an enticing in-app ad showing an upgrade price of only $139. A couple or so days after installing the upgrades my coworker started having a problem with her copy. Whenever she tries to print a sketch to our office laser printer the program crashes. Specifically it happens when she clicks the "Preferences" button in the print dialog. It's a pretty aggravating bug. Judging by the Corel user forums it seems to be a somewhat common bug too. I can't seem to find any reliable solutions there. BTW, the X8 installation on my PC works just fine. We have very similar machines. The only difference is mine has a slightly better video card and a RAID 0 32GB SSD paired with my 2TB internal hard drive.

Her previous copy of X6 (still installed for now) has no problems printing. All her other applications, such as MS Office, work fine as well. X8 will publish to PDF just fine, so making PDFs and printing them from Adobe Reader is one work-around. Saving files down to X6 is not a very productive solution since the backward compatibility of saving in earlier versions is pretty lousy with X8; it tends to convert a lot of enhanced OpenType text to curves and do sometimes do wacky thing with fills. I've already been dealing with this for some time having had X8 (and X7) on my home machine.

The Corel X8 version is Build 18.1.0.661, apparently the latest one. This past summer I had deferred the "anniversary update" of Windows 10 Pro on my coworker's PC (as well as my own) due to the nasty initial bugs that plagued it. I installed it on my PC a few weeks ago. I went ahead and tried running the update on my coworker's PC just to make it current with all updates to see if that would cure the Corel X8 print dialog bug. No dice. It still won't work.

 

[David Wright]

I have had the same issues with Corel going back a couple of versions, either printing or exporting some format which always crash.
With the print crash, I usually go to preview and then print this now to avoid crash.

 

[Bobby H]

That's a decent work-around if the user is able to print a sketch "as is" without needed to make any changes in preferences. For multiple page sketches our office printer can do 2 sided printing and change the way the back side of the page is printed. I often have to get into the preferences and make a couple changes for landscape oriented sketches that are 2 or more pages in length.

Apparently this print dialog bug has been around for some time. I'm kind of surprised Corel's programmers haven't dealt with this bug already.

 

[Bobby H]

Update:
We were able to cure the CorelDRAW X8 print crashes by updating the office printer's driver. I had a slightly newer version of it running on my workstation, which wasn't crashing. It wasn't easy getting the driver updated. We had to go through our service supplier's web site to get it rather than the Konica-Minolta website (which only provided ZIP files that had no executable for actually installing the driver).

Another minor aggravation: the X8 installation on my coworker's PC made all the thumbnails for CorelDRAW .CDR and .CMX files disappear. Thankfully it was an easy enough cure. She had X6 still installed and .CDR files were associated with it. Installing X8 severed the association with the X6 shell extension. Changing the "open with" association to X8 restored the thumbnail previews.

One other thing I dislike about X8: it is extremely laggy at opening files saved in X8, especially anything using editable OpenType objects. If I save a file down to an earlier version like X3 or X6 it opens promptly. But X8 files take forever to open. And they deliver a lot of nonsensical font substitution warnings. If I work on a file in X8 on my notebook PC at home and then open it at work I get font substitution warnings every time, regardless of the fact I am using the same exact font files. Very annoying.

We might not have even bothered with getting X8 upgrades, but the problem is both X8 and X7 are TERRIBLE at saving CorelDRAW files down to earlier versions, such as X3. X8 is even worse about it than X7. Both have issues keeping type editable. X8 is prone to having complex fills do wacky things, just like what happens when bringing Adobe Illustrator generated art into Corel (and vice versa).

 

[ams]

Submit the bug to Corel for fixing. I don't ever print directly from Corel, save as a PDF and then print.