CorelDRAW - CDR File Format

CDR File Format

CDR file format is a proprietary file format developed by Corel Corporation and primarily used for vector graphic drawings. 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).

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 developed also 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 Inkscape and Scribus open source projects as an external tool for CorelDRAW files importing.

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 libcdr, a library for reading CDR files from v1 to the currently latest X6 version 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 writerperfect package. The libcdr library is expected to be used in LibreOffice 3.6, and thanks to public API it can be freely used by other applications.