Is CoreDraw a viable alternative to Adobe Illustrator?
Product: CorelDRAW 8.0 for Power Macintosh
From: Corel (www.corel.com)
Price: US$695; competitive upgrades (from most other graphics programs) US$149
Pros: Good text handling, especially of special symbols. Photo-Paint (also available as a standalone product) is a dramatic improvement over the image editor included in version 6.x and now rivals Adobe Photoshop in features and interface. The packages includes draw, paint and trace capabilities, plus a disc of royalty-free photos and extensive documentation.
Cons: Unreliable text handling by PostScript importer. Program bombed occasionally on a Mac with 64MB RAM while importing files. In one of our tests, a GIF file exported by Photo-Paint could not be read by Adobe Photoshop.
Corel integrates Adobe PDF Technology
A licensing agreement announced in June 1998 with Adobe Systems Inc. integrates Adobe's Acrobat Placed PDF Library into CorelDRAW 8 for Power Macintosh. However, the current version has several limitations that lessen its utility. For starters, it imports only single pages. More seriously, it imports PDFs as placeable, non-editable documents. Adobe Illustrator, by comparison, opens PDFs as fully editable graphics. Worse, when we attempted to work around this limitation by saving the PDF as EPS and opening that in CorelDraw, the resulting graphic opened incorrectly. Again, Illustrator could handle it with no problems. In short, this feature still needs work. (At press time, Corel's web site had a PDF import update for the Windows version only). At the moment, there are no updates to the Mac version of CorelDRAW 8, although some text files are available answering cover FAQ topics. Presumably, this will be rectified in a future update.
Corel says the PDF filter, in the current Mac release, is designed to allow placement of single-page PDF files, and says it plans to develop full-scale PDF publishing "for the next generation of its graphics and desktop publishing products."
As has been our experience with other CorelDRAW releases, import and export problems continue to be the program's Achilles' Heel. A PostScript file that loaded into Adobe Illustrator without problems showed up with no text when opened in CorelDraw; importing the file was even worse, and produced missing graphics as well. Attempting to open the file with the "Convert text to curves" option bombed our computer with 64MB of RAM and Virtual Memory turned on. Failing grades in that test!
We were, however, impressed with the program's on-screen text and image handling. For those who do not need to import or export files to or from other formats, CorelDraw might be worth a try. For those of us in heterogeneous production environments, however, it's like asking for trouble.
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