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So I have .cdr files on my PC and I want to open them on my Debian 7 box. What software do I need to be able to open it?`

I have:

  • 512 MB RAM
  • 3 GHz processor
  • 256 MB graphics
  • with Debian 7

2 Answers 2

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Gimp

I would see if you can open the .cdr files with Gimp. According to this page Gimp supports editing these files. Gimp should be available in the Debian repos, look for the name gimp.

I downloaded this sample image, cup.cdr (uncompressed 18K), from this Corel website. However I wasn't able to open it, there might be a plugin for Gimp.

Inkscape

The other method you could try (which worked for me) is to convert the .cdr image using the command line tool uniconvertor, and then open it up in Inkscape.

$ uniconvertor cup.cdr cup.svg

Once you've created the .svg file you simply open it in Inkscape.

   ss of inkscape

If you don't want to try the above, you can take a look at the Inkscape FAQ, there is a guide on how to import .cdr files as well. The FAQ section is titled: Can I open/import *.cdr (Corel Draw Vector drawing file) files in Inkscape?.

Your mileage may vary?

I found this thread regarding the conversion process.

excerpt

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:20 AM, Sveinn í Felli wrote:

Inkscape can import some versions of .CDR files (ver. 7-X4), from there one can export/save as .SVG. Don't know if there are bugs in that process (e.g. multipage documents, text/font problems, etc.)

Inkscape uses the very same converter as Scribus. It's called UniConvertor and only supports paths with flat fills and strokes (and maybe bitmaps, but I'm not entirely sure). There has been no progress re CDR support in UC in last few years (the primary developer is busy rewriting things yet again), and unfortunately I don't see it changing any time soon.

However there has been quite a bit of progress on reverse-engineering CDR recently on the re-lab side recently, and hopefully things will change now that there is libcdr by one of LibreOffice developers.

source: http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus/2012-January/045476.html

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  • not an answer :-(
    – user49418
    Nov 5, 2013 at 4:25
  • @Utkarsh - can you elaborate? Did you get some sort of error message? Are your .cdr files special in some kind of way?
    – slm ♦
    Nov 5, 2013 at 7:39
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I was able to open a corel draw .cdr file perfectly using LibreOffice Draw, no file conversion needed. I had no such luck with converting to .svg and opening in Inkscape.

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  • Yup. This worked for me even after uniconverter failed complaining of a corrupt file and Inkscape & Gimp also failed.
    – BenB
    Oct 20, 2016 at 4:43

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