OpenType Features Supported in CorelDRAW

CorelDRAW provides extensive typography support by integrating advanced OpenType font capabilities directly into its vector design environment. This article outlines the specific OpenType features supported within CorelDRAW, detailing how designers can leverage glyph alternates, advanced ligatures, numeric styling, and decorative glyphs to achieve precise, professional typography.

Ligatures and Letter Combinations

CorelDRAW automatically evaluates font definitions to resolve awkward character overlaps and enhance readability through various ligature options:

  • Standard Ligatures (liga): Replaces common character combinations, such as "fi," "fl," and "ff," with unified glyphs to prevent visual collisions.
  • Discretionary Ligatures (dlig): Adds stylistic, decorative connections between characters like "st," "ct," or "sp."
  • Contextual Ligatures (clig): Replaces sequences of characters with alternate ligatures that look better in specific contexts.
  • Historical Ligatures (hlig): Provides archaic character combinations found in traditional or vintage typography, such as historical long "s" pairs.

Stylistic and Contextual Alternates

To give designs variety and custom lettering characteristics, CorelDRAW supports several alternate glyph systems:

  • Stylistic Sets (ss01–ss20): Allows users to apply cohesive stylistic variants across an entire font or selected text blocks.
  • Contextual Alternates (calt): Automatically substitutes characters depending on neighboring letters to mimic natural handwriting or balance layout spacing.
  • Stylistic Alternates (salt): Lets designers manually pick purely aesthetic variants for specific individual characters.
  • Swashes (swsh): Activates ornamental flourishes on capital letters, ascenders, and descenders.
  • Titling Alternates (titl): Substitutes glyphs designed specifically to balance scale and weight when used in large display headings.

Numeric and Mathematical Formats

CorelDRAW features complete numerical typesetting control, which is essential for data-heavy graphics, financial charts, and editorial design:

  • Fractions (frac): Converts numbers separated by a slash (e.g., 1/2, 3/4) into properly scaled typographic fractions.
  • Lining Figures (lnum): Sets numbers to a uniform height that matches capital letters, available in both proportional and tabular spacing.
  • Oldstyle Figures (onum): Formats numbers with varying heights, ascenders, and descenders to blend smoothly into blocks of lowercase text.
  • Proportional Figures (pnum): Adjusts number spacing dynamically based on the width of each digit.
  • Tabular Figures (tnum): Formats digits to equal widths for alignment in financial reports and data tables.
  • Slashed Zero (zero): Replaces a standard zero with a slashed glyph to distinguish it clearly from the capital letter "O."
  • Ordinals (ordn): Formats superscripted letters following numbers (e.g., 1st, 2nd).
  • Superscript and Subscript (sups/subs): Generates true proportional superscripts and subscripts rather than digitally scaled-down glyphs.

Capitalization and Small Caps

CorelDRAW supports true typographic small caps without distorting stroke weights:

  • Small Capitals (smcp): Replaces lowercase letters with smaller versions of uppercase glyphs designed to match the font's regular weight and x-height.
  • Small Capitals from Capitals (c2sc): Replaces actual uppercase letters with small capitals for uniform acronyms and abbreviations.
  • Case-Sensitive Forms (case): Adjusts the vertical alignment of punctuation marks, brackets, and hyphens so they center correctly against all-capital text.

How OpenType Is Managed in the Workspace

These features are controlled through the Text tab in the Object Properties (or Properties) docker. Additionally, CorelDRAW features an interactive on-canvas OpenType UI: selecting text with available OpenType variants displays a small downward arrow beneath the glyph, allowing designers to preview and apply alternate styles directly on the screen.