Structure In its first versions, the CDR file format was a completely
proprietary file format primarily used for vector graphic drawings, recognizable by the first two bytes of the file being "WL". Starting with CorelDraw 3, the file format changed to a
Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) envelope, recognizable by the first four bytes of the file being "RIFF", and a "CDR*vrsn" in bytes 9 to 15, with the asterisk "*" being just a blank in early versions. Beginning with CorelDraw 4 it included the version number of the writing program in hexadecimal ("4" meaning version 4, "D" meaning version 13). The actual data chunk of the RIFF remains a Corel proprietary format. From version X4 (14) on, the CDR file is a ZIP-compressed directory of several files, among them XML files and the RIFF-structured
riffdata.cdr with the familiar version signature in versions X4 (CDREvrsn) and X5 (CDRFvrsn), and a
root.dat with CorelDraw X6, where the bytes 9 to 15 look slightly different – "CDRGfver" in a file created with X6. "F" was the last valid hex digit, and the "fver" now indicates that the letter before no longer represents a hex digit. There is no publicly available CDR file format specification. Other CorelDraw file formats include CorelDraw Compressed (CDX), CorelDraw Template (CDT) and Corel Presentation Exchange (CMX).
Use of CDR files in other programs In December 2006, the
sK1 open-source project team started to
reverse-engineer the CDR format. The results and the first working snapshot of the CDR importer were presented at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 conference taking place in May 2007 in Montreal (Canada). Later on the team parsed the structure of other Corel formats with the help of the open source CDR Explorer. As of 2008, the sK1 project claims to have the best import support for CorelDraw file formats among open source software programs. The sK1 project also developed the UniConvertor, a command line open source tool which supports conversion from CorelDraw ver.7-X4 formats (CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX) to other formats. UniConvertor is also used in the
Inkscape and
Scribus open source projects as an external tool for importing CorelDraw files. In 2007,
Microsoft blocked CDR file format in Microsoft Office 2003 with the release of Service Pack 3 for Office 2003. Microsoft later apologized for inaccurately blaming the CDR file format and other formats for security problems in Microsoft Office and released some tools for solving this problem. In 2012, the joint LibreOffice/re-lab team implemented , a library for reading CDR files from version 7 to X3 and CMX files. The library has extensive support for shapes and their properties, including support for color management and spot colors, and has a basic support for text. The library provides a built-in converter to SVG, and a converter to OpenDocument is provided by package. The library is used in LibreOffice starting from version 3.6, and thanks to public API it can be freely used by other applications.
Other applications supporting CDR files CDR file format import is partially or fully supported in following applications: •
Adobe Illustrator – CorelDraw 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 • CorelCAD • Corel
PaintShop Pro • Corel
WordPerfect Office •
Inkscape - CorelDRAW versions 7 through X4 •
LibreOffice using •
Macromedia FreeHand – CorelDraw 7, 8 •
Microsoft Visio 2002 – CorelDraw! drawing file versions 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 (.cdr), Corel Clipart (.cmx) •
sK1 – partial support •
Xara Designer Pro and
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer – early versions of CorelDraw CDR and CMX == See also ==