Product Reviews

So what's new? Well naturally, as with every past launch, the CorelDRAW interface sports a new, fresh look, though in practice this boils down to little more than redesigned icons and less cramped toolbars.

One area of the interface that has been completely reworked is the Welcome Screen which now offers tabbed access to help with new features, a gallery showing sample images and, for the first time, integrated update information.

It's the main Quick Start pane that matters, though, and this has been revamped to show larger, full-colour thumbnail previews of recently opened files.

The Quick Start pane also offers quick access to the New from template dialog, which has also been completely redesigned and provides a much wider range of 80 options, organised into categories such as brochures, business cards and so on. CorelDRAW X4 also now offers a dedicated Save as template command to add your own designs to the options available.

And to help you quickly locate the design you're looking for the New from template dialog includes a search box with which you can find options based on author, keywords and so on.

Of course to find your own templates in this way you'll need to add keyword and descriptive data yourself and CorelDRAW X4's Save dialogs now encourage this by default. The use of searchable metadata really comes into its own when working on Vista systems as this lets you instantly find matching artwork across all indexed locations on your hard disk.

Vista users also benefit from X4's larger, higher quality thumbnails and from support for Explorer's preview pane, which lets you zoom in on artwork and see previews of all pages.

It's not just file handling that's been improved: so has the range of supported file formats. Unsurprisingly, Corel adds support for its own Painter X files and makes use of its development work on Paint Shop Pro Photo and Designer to add support for Camera RAW and AutoCAD DXF and DWG formats.

In addition X4 adds import support for the latest Microsoft Word 2007 files and, for the first time, Publisher PUB files (2002, 2003 and 2007 versions). Most significantly CorelDRAW X4 adds updated import and export support for the latest versions of Adobe's Photoshop PSD and Acrobat PDF standards and now lets you base colour management handling on Adobe's freely downloadable Color Management Module (CMM).

In a boost to its drawing power, CorelDRAW X4 builds on X3's introduction of the PowerTRACE capability for direct bitmap-to-vector conversion. You can now right-click to quickly access tracing presets, for example. For greater control you simply call up the dialog and this now adds improved options for handling smoothing and corners as well as the ability to redefine, merge or delete output colours.

Most importantly, X4's PowerTRACE now adds support for centre line as well as outline tracing. This is essential when you're attempting to recreate technical illustrations as it means that each traced line is output as a single easily editable path rather than as an inflexible outlined stroke.

Even with these improvements CorelDRAW's PowerTRACE is still no match in terms of power and speed for Illustrator's LiveTrace capability, but it's a great addition to your graphical toolkit and especially useful when trying to convert legacy paper artwork.

Where tracing usually falls down is with text, as to recreate readable and editable characters you really need to have access to the original font, and working out the typeface you need is difficult.

CorelDRAW X4's "WhatTheFont?!.." command, however, makes this ludicrously easy. All you do is choose the command, draw a selection box around your text and the resulting screen capture is automatically sent off to MyFont.com, where an online wizard quickly helps you indentify the typeface ready for purchase and download.

Of course the main credit for this solution belongs to MyFont, and you don't need CorelDRAW to take advantage of it, but it is certainly handy having it integrated like this.

CorelDRAW X4 has plenty more to offer when it comes to handling typefaces, starting with its included fonts. The new version provides over 1,000 OpenType fonts, which can be quickly viewed, installed and uninstalled using the bundled copy of Bitstream

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Font Navigator 2006.

Most impressive of all - and our favourite new X4 feature - is the live text preview. Select some text, open the typeface dropdown on the Character docker and, as you hold your mouse over an installed font, your text's typeface automatically updates so you can rapidly explore what various options would look like in situ.

Other text-based advances include the ability to mirror text blocks horizontally and vertically, improved quotation mark handling and improvements to CorelDRAW's print merge capability.

Most striking is the new support for table handling via a new interactive Table tool and new dedicated Table menu and property bar. These offer all the expected commands for merging and splitting cells, inserting rows and columns, managing borders and so on.

It's certainly far easier to manage text tables like this than through the tabs of previous versions, but the fact that the resulting grid is fixed and doesn't adapt to its content is a major limitation. On the other hand you can place design elements in cells so there are various graphical uses to which the tables can be put.

CorelDRAW X4's text handling is improved, then, but it still lags behind Illustrator's in most ways. There's one exception to this, but it is a very important one: unlike Illustrator, CorelDRAW offers multiple page handling. This is a massive advantage, not just for producing multiple-page publications such as brochures, but also when trying out different concepts.

In the past the way CorelDRAW did this was confusing: whenever you added a layer to one page, an empty version appeared on all others. Now, using X4's revamped Object Manager you can add layers independently to each page, which is a far more intuitive approach. In addition, it means that you can now add non-printing guideline layers tailored to each page, reserving the master page for layers and guidelines that you want to see throughout your project.

So far X4 has provided a range of more-or-less significant enhancements but, with the honourable exception of live text preview, none breaks significant new ground. The one introduction that seems to fit the bill is X4's new web-hosted collaboration and review capabilities.

These are handled through the new ConceptShare docker: from this location you can sign up to the service (it's another third party-developed feature) and then post your designs, which are then organised into workspaces containing multiple concepts. Other users can then be invited to view the concepts, post comments and even chat about the artwork in real time.

The elephant in the room is Adobe PDF which has provided a platform for electronic collaboration and review for the past 15 years and which CorelDRAW has long supported. Admittedly PDF's longstanding round-robin approach isn't as efficient as a centralised web-based solution, but that's why the latest Acrobat Professional 8 (included in Adobe's CS3 suites) enables web-based review using the latest free Adobe Reader.

Pitched against a freely available, established and superior standard - behind the scenes ConceptShare rasterizes all posted artwork to JPEG - I can't see many taking it up. And that would remain the case even if it didn't cost $20 a month for standalone designers and up to $200 a month for enterprise-level use.

Over its 14 releases the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite has built up enough power to keep most occasional professional users more than happy. In fact, with its multiple page support and its bundled templates, clip art, fonts and copy of Photo-Paint (see below) it offers some real advantages over the market-leading Illustrator. And for new, non-professional users, X4 is probably the better choice as it offers most of Illustrator's design power without its high-end complexity and cost.

Persuading its occasional non-professional users that they should upgrade, however, requires delivering both a little excitement and some real tangible benefits. X3 did this; X4, alas does not.

At various times in its history Corel has included a whole host of supporting applications in the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, covering everything from business however, apart from basic font management and screen capture utilities, all you get is the bitmap editor, Corel Photo-Paint.

Photo-Paint shares much of the same code as the CorelDRAW module which means that it benefits from many of the X4 enhancements including the new look, improved thumbnail previews, text-based search and, for what it's worth, the ConceptShare-based review and collaboration functionality.

Particularly relevant in the bitmap context is support for the latest Photoshop PSD format, Adobe colour management and RAW files. The latter is particularly useful, and allows you interactively and non-destructively colour-correct photos taken with digital cameras that use the format.

There's a new grid-based dialog with which you can straighten images scanned or photographed at an angle. Tone handling has moved up-market with the ability to add, delete and edit individual nodes on the image curve, while the new histogram feedback shows what effect these changes have on tone distribution.

Finally, new lenses have been added, which let you non-destructively convert colour images to black and white, mix channels, map gradients and apply photographic filters.