CorelDRAW 10

Product: CorelDRAW 10 (and service pack 1)
From: Corel
Price: about C$700. The suite carries a suggested retail price of $249.99 US for the upgrade version or $569.99 ($399 street) for the full version.
Pros: Includes vector graphics (CorelDRAW), paint (Photo-Paint) and animation creation (R.A.V.E.) tools, plus font management, clip-art cataloguing, screen capture, texture-making and bitmap tracing utilities. New R.A.V.E. vector animation tool adds Flash-like features. Photo-Paint includes several KPT filters acquired from MetaCreations and other new enhancements. (See part 2 for a full list of new features.)
Cons: Spreadsheet tables imported via OLE sometimes don't print the way they appear on-screen (or the way they should); other colour-separation anomalies may occur. Import modules don’t support current file formats of some third-party applications.

For years, CorelDRAW was almost a joke at some graphics service bureaus. Particularly at Macintosh-centric shops, walking in with a CorelDRAW file was akin to wearing a sign that says "Kick Me." Some prepress shops won't even accept CorelDRAW files. They've seen too many problems from the program notorious for creating great looking, totally unprintable images.

Much of this notoriety was well-deserved in early releases. Those who used the program back in its heyday, when Corel owned something close to 90 percent of the PC graphics market, remember its infamously flaky PostScript output, its ability to create blends and objects so complex, the PostScript interpreters of the day couldn't rasterize the files without choking. They remember the knockoffs of famous fonts that were, when examined closely, nothing short of hideous in their inexactitude. Then Adobe and Macromedia got serious about the PC graphics market and released versions of Illustrator and FreeHand, respectively, that proved that seamless cross-platform compatibility between a PC and a Mac was possible. Corel tried that too, with a couple of versions of CorelDRAW for Mac, but it never quite caught on. And then, in the last few years before Dr. Michael Cowpland left the company, Corel fell victim to the pressures of a shareholder-driven release schedule that saw it releasing buggy, beta-quality software that never worked quite right for six to nine months, until the patches came out that solved its most egregious errors. And by that time, another version was just around the corner. Indeed, we practically gave up on CorelDraw back at version 5, where "Revision F" finally resulted in a program that was close to usable in a production environment.

Who Uses CorelDRAW, anyway?

Today, many magazines that accept advertisements from clients have to -- or choose to -- deal with client artwork in all its forms. Even those which specify "Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, EPS and/or PDF only" as a matter of rule will receive CorelDRAW files from clients who, for better or worse, have chosen to work with its rich feature set and extensive collection of fonts and clip art. Yes, CorelDRAW can output a Photoshop-compatible TIFF or JPEG, export its vector artwork in Illustrator format and create EPS and PDF file but these people apparently don't know how to do that. It's difficult enough to get them to include the fonts, never mind specify a Pantone spot colour properly.

Now in its second decade, CorelDRAW has sold well into the amateur and corporate graphics markets, in part because of Corel’s aggressive bundling of thousands of fonts and literally tends of thousands of pieces of clip art. Other factors in CorelDRAW’s popularity have been its relatively low price and the wide availability of inexpensive older versions of the software. We've seen copies of CorelDRAW bundled with disk drives; we've seen old copies in discount software stores and online at prices under $40. It's also a name well recognized by the corporate crowd, many of whom also use Corel's WordPerfect suite.

In version 10, these users are well served by some of the suite’s new features designed to further simply common tasks. A new PerfectShape tool, for example, adds over 75 new shapes such as arrows, bursts, flowchart symbols, lightning bolts and “thought balloons.” While most of these objects were available as part of symbol libraries in previous releases, the new tool provides the objects with built-in intelligence, allowing objects to be stretched and resized without distortion.

And, yes, there are some professionals who adore it, too. These users will love the program’s new Preflight tab in the Print… and Save as PDF… dialogs. It zeroes in on errors and helps you fix issues before wasting time and money on the production of flawed output.

Like many computer tools, CorelDRAW has idiosyncrasies, but once you learn how to create files that print properly, you can pretty much work around the weak spots. In fact, that's just what we found we had to do to successfully use CorelDRAW 10 in a production environment.

We've been working with CorelDRAW 10 since its release, but knew that we might as well wait for the inevitable service pack(s) to arrive before really putting it to the test. Now, with the release of Service Pack 1 for CorelDRAW 10, it's time for a closer look.

While the Read Me file accompanying the Service Pack lists a litany of bug-fixes, there are a few especially notable ones:

General performance issues have been addressed.
Issues with Text appearing in the original location after being moved or edited have been addressed.
Random errors within the Bitmap Effects have been addressed.
Random crashes when using the Web Image Optimizer have been resolved for single processor computers.
Text in CMYK colors now retains the color properly.

And there are a few others that make you wonder how professionals must have struggled with the 10.0 release:

Type 1 fonts now download properly when selecting a PPD and printing to file.
Errors occurring when printing Type 1 fonts to some printers have been addressed.
Grayscale objects will only print on the Black plate when a color profile is applied.
PDF - Character spacing issues have been addressed.
PDF- Registration marks now show on more than just the black plate.

Aside from the obvious question of "how the heck could such serious problems have made it past the beta testers?", you have to wonder just how many other bugs are still lurking in a program with flaws this obvious. While we won't profess to have tested every single feature of the program, we have used it to prepare images for professional CMYK colour separations and spot-colour output, used it to create PDFs, Web graphics, high-res bitmaps and many other tasks we suspect are common jobs for graphics professionals.

Corel R.A.V.E.

New in this release is version 1.0 of an application dubbed R.A.V.E., a somewhat contrived acronym for “Real Animated Vector Effects.” This program closely resembles CorelDRAW in its interface (in fact, it’s practically identical, distinguished primarily by its Timeline window at the bottom of the screen and the absence of a few menu commands and effects). This timeline is similar in design and function to that found in Macromedia Flash and, indeed, R.A.V.E. can produce ShockWave Flash files, as well as animated GIFs, SVG vector files and QuickTime movies (etc.) as output. Unfortunately, its SWF animations are not as sophisticated as those that Flash is capable of creating (R.A.V.E. does not include the advanced scripting abilities of Flash, nor can it create a nested animation of, say, someone walking across the screen), but R.A.V.E. is significantly easier to learn and use.

We discovered one apparent bug in version 1.0 of the program that caused the “convert text to Artistic Text” (click Text, Convert) command to sometimes be unavailable. Fortunately, it seems to work reliably if text is converted immediately after it is created.

Conclusion: On the power scale, R.A.V.E. lags behind both LiveMotion and the category leader, Flash 5.
As is the case with Adobe’s LiveMotion, R.A.V.E. lacks the ability to import Flash files. R.A.V.E. is best suited for basic web interface design tasks, such as animated buttons and simple banners or title animations.

Corel A.R.M.

Another acronym found within the CorelDRAW suite is one you’ll never see if you’re lucky. It’s Corel A.R.M. – the Application Recovery Manager Wizard. It pops up when the Corel application you are using becomes unstable. This wizard guides you through s series of steps to help resolve the problem. You are given the opportunity to save your documents and close the application. It can also send an error report to Corel to advise them of what went wrong. Unfortunately, we became quite familiar with this dialog during our tests.

Photo-Paint

Corel, like Microsoft, often seems to be inspired by other products in the applications it creates. Photo-Paint was, and remains, slavishly similar to Adobe Photoshop. And now that Adobe has been adding Web export functionality to the Photoshop package via its ImageReady application, Corel is moving in this direction, too. Its Web Image Optimizer feature allows you to see the before-and-after effects that JPEG, PNG or GIF compression will have on your image. As is typical in many aspects of Corel Photo-Paint, this function is somewhat less sophisticated than that of ImageReady, but it does the trick. A collection of presets helps you choose various settings for low, medium or high quality results, and the Optimizer calculates how long images will take to load at a variety of common modem and broadband speeds.

Elsewhere, a new “Hide Active Object” feature lets you hide objects and changes on different layers. Many effects now feature real-time previews. This is particularly useful for effects such as the new Interactive Drop Shadow.

There are also a few features not found in Adobe Photoshop. Photo-Paint 10 includes a red-eye removal tool that removes this common flaw from scanned photographs much more easily than with Photoshop. It’s fairly crude, but does the trick. For best results, we found it necessary to make a small selection for each eye – it tends to affect skin colour with unfortunate consequences if too large a selection area is used.

There’s also a nifty Smart Blur effect that lets you create images with sharp edges and blurred contents. Such an effect could be achieved in Adobe’s program using Feather commands and blur effects, but Corel’s implementation is definitely easier. Text transformations produce distorted envelope effects similar to those featured in Adobe’s new Photoshop 6. And Photo-Paint’s Text on a Path feature isn’t possible to duplicate in Photoshop at all, without the help of an extra-cost plug-in or application.

Under the hood, the program sports a completely redesigned color management user interface, with several predefined colour management “styles,” optimized for desktop printing, professional output, Web output, etc. This is a hugely complex topic and it’s good to see Corel working to reduce the complexity.

The applications in the CorelDraw suite provide a vast number of import and export modules. Some of these modules don’t support the latest file formats (the FreeHand import module is at least two revisions behind), but they generally work well. The Interpreted PostScript and EPS module is very good, although it can’t handle some Encapsulated PostScript code created by Adobe’s latest Illustrator release.

Corel says it has improved the performance of Photo-Paint 10 by incorporating Display Caching. We tested this feature on a fairly low-end PC with a 400 MHz Celeron processor and 128MB of memory, by loading a 2000x2700-pixel 24-bit colour image, approximately 20MB in size. We were able to pan and zoom the image in real time and apply effects on portions of the image without appreciable delay. We did, however, experience occasional application crashes. As always, saving your work often is a good plan here.

CorelDRAW

The presets approach also manifests in the Draw application, where interactive effects such as Blend and Drop Shadow now have presets for common settings. The Help file’s How To section makes it possible to find your way around the program without being a CorelDRAW whiz. As with every new release of CorelDRAW, there seems to be a million features we seldom if ever use, however, a couple of the new “Dockers” (essentially, task palettes attached to the side of your document window) here seem especially worthwhile. The first is a multi-step Undo palette (not dissimilar to Adobe’s History palette) that allows you to return to an earlier state in your work with a click.

The second allows you to save sequences of commands as scripts – superficially similar to Adobe’s Action Lists, but nicely implemented and very useful. A number of predefined scripts ensure that this feature won’t just be used by computer geniuses.

Conclusion

It’s good; occasionally great. CorelDRAW 10 has been awarded “Editor’s Choice” awards by several publications including PC Magazine, thanks to its comprehensive feature set and extraordinary value. If only the program proved more reliable, we’d be inclined to agree. There’s no question: CorelDRAW is the feature leader in PC illustration software.

Other Versions

Corel in Nov. 2000 announced that CorelDRAW 10 for Macintosh would be available to the public in the first half of 2001. As it is, at this writing, the second half of 2001, we expect an announcement RSN.

There has been no announcement of plans for a Linux version of CorelDRAW 10. Version 9 of the suite is available as a commercial product at street prices around US$200, and Photo-Paint 9 for Linux is freely downloadable from linux.corel.com.

For Further Reading:

In part 2 of this feature, we'll look at the techniques and tools we use to get the most out of CorelDRAW 10. (Coming soon....)
http://www.designer.com/
http://www.designer-info.com/Draw/corel_draw_10.htm - Review

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