Product Reviews

CorelDraw has been around for donkey's years, and it's just about the best-known graphics package on the PC. The central CorelDraw application is a high-powered vector drawing program that matches professional-level rivals like Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand pretty much tool-for-tool.

But this suite also includes Corel Photo-Paint, a full-blown bitmap image-editor and paint package that rivals Photoshop. It uses 'objects' rather than 'layers', but otherwise it's got a similar range of effects, specialised masking and path tools and text-handling tricks. It doesn't possess the same raw, in-depth image-editing power as Photoshop, and lacks its superb interface, but for the money you can't complain.

Both of these programs get a good working over in the latest version, but the big news is the addition of Corel RAVE, an animation tool that can export animated GIFs, interactive Flash SWF files, .Avi files and QuickTime movies. It's no add-on utility, either, but a serious and powerful standalone application in its own right.

All this sounds terrific, but once you've finished marvelling at the sheer number of things Corel has added or improved in the CorelDraw and Photo-Paint applications, that initial excitement fades into something rather like, well, boredom really.

Professional designers may find the enhanced colour management options easier to use, while there's now support for 'In-RIP trapping' for PostScript Level 3 output. Neither of which are likely to affect the average user, but they do make the point that this is a professional graphics suite and not some cut-price wannabe.

On a day-to-day level, the redesigned Scrapbook

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Docker now lets you find images using keywords, the colour tools have been tweaked and texture fills are now rendered at the same resolution as other interactive effects. You didn't know they weren't before? Many of the changes in CorelDraw 10 fix deficiencies you didn't know it had in the first place, and probably wouldn't have made much difference to the way you worked anyway.

Other changes are more useful. It's easier to customise your toolbars and menus, you get a real-time preview to check effects before you waste time applying them and, just in case you do need to backtrack, there's an Undo docking toolbar that lists your actions and also lets you create automated scripts for repetitive tasks.

A new set of 'PerfectShapes' works rather like those in Microsoft Office, in that you can drag on a handle to change their characteristics, and the interactive tools (transparency, drop shadow and so on) now come with presets so that you don't have to keep fiddling around with sliders and pop-ups.

CorelDraw's web export tools are beefed up, too, with a new rollover creator, and there's an image optimiser for exporting space-efficient web graphics. The program's DTP capabilities get a boost, too, with a new Page Sorter for navigating around multi-page documents and a Print Merge tool for bulk mail shots.

The changes to Photo-Paint are fairly minor. There's an improved drop shadow tool with more customisation options and greater consistency with CorelDraw's, and masks are no longer clipped when you move them outside document margins. It's all rather minor, to be honest.

Thank goodness, then, for Corel RAVE which, for existing users, is possibly worth the upgrade price (£200) on its own. And its inclusion makes CorelDraw 10 pretty good value for anyone buying it for the first time. The interface looks complicated, but it proves easy to master, and what's especially impressive is the quality and depth of the drawing tools - they're as powerful as those in CorelDraw itself.

CorelDraw 10 isn't cheap, but you get a lot for your money. RAVE is the most impressive advance, though, because the changes made to the other two programs are pretty modest compared to the giant leaps made by Adobe with Illustrator 9, for example.