Let me share a recent example in which I was able to extend the life of the evaluation copy of a software.
After 30 days, my Corel Draw evaluation copy expired. Since IrfanView fulfills most of my graphic needs, I wasn’t interested in shelling out over US$ 400 to buy a full license of Corel Draw. However, I recently faced a situation that demanded editing of a CDR file (for the uninitiated, CDR is Corel Draw’s native file extension).
With Twitter and favicons, one needs small sizes of logos. Since the full size GTM360 logo is too large to be converted into a favicon, I decided to make a truncated version comprising only of the 360 and the ring around it. My graphic design agency supplied a version using which I created the favicon shown on the right. As you can see, the touch up work done on the full logo to create the truncated version looks shabby and I wasn’t keen on using this version.
I decided to work on the original CDR version of the full size logo and remove the characters G, T and M in text-mode, so that I’d be left with the truncated logo. However, the evaluation copy of my Corel Draw had run its course and I wasn’t about to buy a full version for such a small job. I was about to give up when I double-clicked the CDR file. Lo and behold, despite expiry of the Corel Draw trial version, I found that it opened up in a restricted mode.
As you can see below, Save, Save As, Export, Print, and many other important commands are dimmed out in this restricted mode.
However, using the commands that we still active, I was able to create the truncated logo.
But, the problem was that I couldn’t save the resulting image because the Save command was not active. Once again on the verge of giving up, it suddenly struck me that I could always use Print Screen key to take an image of the whole screen. Which is exactly what I did, and then used IrfanView to crop out the truncated logo.
Using PowerPoint’s transparent image feature, I converted it to the required favicon, which you can see on the right.
As you can easily make out, the final favicon created using Print Screen and an extended evaluation copy of Corel Draw looks far better than the starting version supplied by my graphics design agency.
This experience shows that some packages continue to be useful even past the expiry period of their evaluation versions. Thank you Corel Draw!