: Excellent for high-volume tasks like business cards where waste reduction is key.
: Creating background fills or repeating textures by tiling a single pattern object across a large canvas.
The is a powerful productivity macro for CorelDRAW designed to automate the process of arranging multiple copies of an object across a page . It is particularly popular among print professionals for "stepping and repeating" designs like business cards, labels, or decals with precision. Oberon Object Tiler
The Oberon Object Tiler is a free VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macro designed for CorelDRAW. Its core function is simple yet incredibly powerful: it takes a selected object—such as a business card design, a label, a badge, or any other graphic element—and automatically duplicates it across your page in a grid pattern, tiling the page efficiently. The macro is designed to maximize the use of space, ensuring that as many copies as possible fit onto your sheet. This is a common requirement for anyone printing multiple identical items on a single sheet of paper or label stock.
Among these, the Oberon System—created in the late 1980s by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht at ETH Zürich—stands out as a masterpiece of minimalist software engineering. At the heart of Oberon’s unique user experience is its non-overlapping, tiling user interface. Central to the mechanics and conceptual framework of this interface is the , a foundational architecture that manages how information, user interface controls, and application data are laid out, updated, and interacted with on the screen. : Excellent for high-volume tasks like business cards
Every element managed by the Tiler is a derivative of the base type Display.Frame . Frames are recursive objects; a frame can contain sub-frames. The Object Tiler navigates this tree structure to distribute system events—such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and redraw messages—to the precise pixel coordinates occupied by an object. Because the layout is strictly tiled, coordinate calculations are mathematically straightforward and highly performant, eliminating the complex occlusion and clipping math required by overlapping window managers. 3. Inter-Object Communication via Messages
The Object Tiler relies heavily on a message-passing architecture. When a user resizes a column or a specific viewer, the Tiler does not manually redraw every component. Instead, it broadcasts a layout modification message ( Display.ModifyMsg ) down the object tree. Each frame receives this message, calculates its new boundary lines based on the Tiler’s constraints, and updates its internal state before rendering itself to the screen. Why the Tiling Paradigm Mattered It is particularly popular among print professionals for
For any object to be tiled, it must implement a minimal interface:
Double-click the main run function inside the Macro Manager.
It splits the currently active viewer in half, allocating the lower portion to the new viewer.