Hi there

I want to draw half a circle and fade the inside of it so that it looks like a crescent moon, but the inside must have a feather/fade effect and the outside remain solid. I tried in Corel X3 using the transparency tool. It just doesn't give me the curved fade I am looking for. It only fades in straight lines.

Can anybody help me with that?

With design programs, and CorelDRAW is no slouch, there's always more than one way to accomplish a task. Mine would be to duplicate the circle, offcenter the duplicate to the right so it overlaps. Keep that selected and use the "trim" tool to cut away the original. Then using the "mesh" tool you could apply lighter shades of the base color, which would create a gradient (softer edge). 

phibaoptik:

It just doesn't give me the curved fade I am looking for. It only fades in straight lines.

Change the "mode" from linear to radial from the dropdown on the interactive toolbar.

What about creating your moon shape. Adding a dropshadow. Break apart and delete the original vector. Change the "dropshadow" Lens object to white and duplicate (copy & paste) until you have the opacity you like.

Not sure if this will work for your needs

How about just a simple contour to the inside?

The center will fade and the outside will remain "solid".

All great answers, but they don't satisfy the original request; which was a hard edge on the outside curve and a gradient or soft edge on the inside. I played with several ideas, including some of these suggestions, but at nearly midnight the only solution I could think of at that hour was "mesh" fill. It might be possible to use the separated shadow and then put the solid crescent on top and apply the transparency with a radial type to the inside to eliminate the hard edge. 

Another thought occurred to me, and this might be the solution - depending on the background color. For example, if the background was black (night), create 2 crescents (yellow) and the other (black) and use the "blend" tool... voila!

I think the blend option might be the easiest

I concur with you... brain was too tired at midnight to come up with using blend. Tried it out against a black background with yellow crescent moon and it actually looks pretty good! And it's easy to change the amount of fade this way too. 

A true transparency, fading from the outside curve to the inside curve is quite tricky: it's relativity easy to get what looks like a transparency, (just fading into a uniform background fill).

Option1) keep it vector and use multiple objects - Create the moon shape. Create the inner 'sliver' shape. Blend between them. Change the inner's transparency to uniform, 100%. Select the blend. Break it, ungroup it, "Simplify" it.

The 'simplify' is a bit intensive, so be patient. The end result will be progressive shapes of more and more transparency; the more shapes (ie more steps in the blend) the smoother it will be. Change the acceleration of the blend to change the acceleration of the transparency.

(The banding is due to me removing the outline, but you could select the complete thing, convert it to bitmap, add some noise and blur it a bit to get rid of it)

Option2) Create a bitmap "shadow" and use this for a transparency mask - Crate a circle. Fill with black. Create a drop-shadow from it. Draw an enclosing box bigger than it. Fill box with white. Put box behind shadow. Select all. Export selected (BMP/GIF). Create moon shape. Use bitmap transparency and load image just saved. Stretch bitmap to suit.

I can't think on any other methods that would give as good results.