CorelKit: An Extensible CorelDraw VBA Program for Geoscience Drawing

CorelKit is developed with the built-in VBA environment of CorelDraw®, and is a new plug-in in CorelDraw for geological and geochemical drawing. CorelKit can help users quickly and easily draw geological and geochemical graphs, such as scatterplot, triangular scatterplot, line chart, histogram, bar chart, box plot, pie graph, etc. In order to adapt to the geological application, the above functions are strengthened. Scatterplot and triangular scatterplot provide nearly 150 common basemaps, covering rock classification, structural environment discrimination, mineral genesis, isotope geochemistry, etc., for the convenience of the user mapping. Meanwhile, CorelKit further provides a structural joint rose diagram and sulfur isotopic composition diagram. This software also has many practical functions such as Bézier line topology, Multiple Bézier lines close fill, Single inner fill, Correction basemap, Add a compass, Add a scale, which facilitates daily geological drawing. The software has a friendly interface, in both Chinese and English versions, and is suitable for CorelDraw X4 and later versions. We introduced the Bézier line topology to CorelKit for the first time, which is similar to the GIS® topology for geological maps. According to the “GB/T 958–2015 Geological Legends Used for Regional Geological Map”, a two-color filling library of rock pattern pictures is established, which is convenient to realize the two-color filling of sedimentary rocks, metamorphic rocks and magmatic rocks patterns. Obviously, CorelKit makes up for many shortcomings of CorelDraw in geosciences and is a very practical tool for geoscience researchers.