.CDR File Format – CorelDRAW 1 and 2

CorelDRAW drawing

The first two versions of CorelDRAW used a format of their own, before CorelDRAW 3 moved to RIFF. libcdr calls it Waldo and treats every such file as version 2.

Signature

  1. 0Signature WL, the bytes 57 4C2 bytes
  2. 2Version byte what libcdr’s source calls the micro version1 byte
  3. 3Zero1 byte
  4. 4Records the drawingvaries
The start of a CorelDRAW 1 or 2 file.

libcdr recognises the file by its first two bytes alone.

Records

libcdr reads the rest of the file as records and draws them, with fills, outlines and transformations stored in each object rather than in tables, and colours as a one-byte model and a 32-bit value. How the records are laid out is not set out anywhere outside libcdr’s source, and these pages do not describe it. The explorer shows only the signature of these files.