Product Reviews

At one point, the launch of each new release of the CorelDRAW suite was a major event - much like each new version of Photoshop is today. Over the last five years, however, Corel has squandered its early dominance of the PC design world and now Adobe and Macromedia lead the pack. So does this latest version 11 mark a return to form or a further decline?

In terms of its core drawing capabilities, I've always been a fan of DRAW's tools and approach, but there's certainly no harm in improving the basics. There are new tools for drawing rectangles, ovals and curves by specifying three points; a new Pen tool, which acts as a simpler version of the existing Bézier tool; and a Polyline tool, which lets you quickly alternate curved and straight lines. You can also now set the snapping threshold that controls how near objects must be before they exert a magnetic pull on others.

Once you've drawn your lines and objects, there are also more editing options. Particularly useful is the ability to quickly join multiple paths into a single object, with control over how the line segments close. There are three new options - simplify, front minus back and back minus front - for combining and intersecting objects. Most useful of all are the new pressure-sensitive Smudge and Roughen tools, which add bulge and ripple effects to an object's outline - ideal for preventing vector artwork looking too clinical.

The feature that Corel is highlighting most in DRAW 11 is the ability to turn your objects into symbols. This is certainly simple - all you have to do is drag your selection onto the new Library docker window. From here, you can drag multiple copies, or 'instances', of the symbol back onto your image that you can resize, rotate and reposition. As well as consistency, the main advantage is that if you edit the master all instances are also automatically updated.

Existing users are probably thinking 'what's so new about that? CorelDRAW has long offered object cloning, which has the same benefits.' To my mind, they'd be right. The new symbol handling really doesn't make much difference to image creation, especially as CorelDRAW doesn't offer the advanced symbol brushes and restyling capabilities of Illustrator 10. Where symbols are important is in Web imaging, as they enable output file sizes to be crushed.

Of course, symbols aren't of much use for bitmap output, but at least DRAW's GIF and JPEG optimisation has seen some improvement - you can now save settings, for example, and output to JPEG2000 format (though browser support for this is currently negligible). Symbols are particularly relevant for Web vector formats. DRAW's SVG output has been radically improved with support for compressed SVGZ format, presentation attributes styling, character subsetting and so on.

The most popular Web file standard where symbol-based handling really comes into its own is the Flash SWF format. Flash authoring is currently seeing explosive growth and Corel offers the dedicated R.A.V.E. 2 application for exactly this purpose. It might be a dedicated application, but effectively it's just DRAW with a Movie menu and a Timeline and I still can't see why its functionality isn't offered within the main application.

Other than these doubts

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about its standalone nature, my opinions of the first version of R.A.V.E. were mixed. With the ability to create animations by handling editable blends, it certainly let you produce striking effects very quickly. Set against this, though, was the difficulty of handling more complex animations, the bandwidth-demanding end results and the lack of any interactive control. Ultimately, I felt that R.A.V.E. wouldn't really get used that much.

However, in this new release, R.A.V.E.'s impact factor is greater. You can now tween text on a path, animating such factors as text position and text properties; tween Perfect Shape properties, animating size, position, fill and outline properties; and even tween 3D vector extrusions, animating light source, colour and intensity. You can also now quickly preview your animations in your favourite browser.

R.A.V.E. 2 also includes more serious professional capabilities, such as the ability to set up nested sprites. Sprites are reusable symbols with their own independent timeline - essential, for example, to set up an animation of a man walking across the screen. To help ensure minimum file sizes as well as symbol support R.A.V.E. now allows text to be output as system text rather than curves. Most important of all is the new support for behaviours. These are very basic compared to Flash MX's ActionScript, but they do let you control the Timeline, fetch URLs and load new movies.

All told, R.A.V.E. is certainly no longer a gimmick and can be used to produce some impressive work. Even so, it still majors on bandwidth-heavy, high-impact animations and it just can't compete with Flash MX in terms of efficiency, multimedia capabilities or interactivity. In other words, while R.A.V.E. 2 now makes a useful Flash add-on utility, I doubt whether many users will employ it to produce finished work.

Ultimately, I'm just not convinced that R.A.V.E. 2 or the latest PHOTO-PAINT (see opposite) really cut it. If you don't already have a photo editor or Flash authoring package, they'll get you up and running, but advanced users will soon hit a ceiling and professionals will have to look elsewhere. In the final analysis, the Corel Graphics Suite stands or fails by the central DRAW module. So what else is new?

Not a lot. There are a couple of minor text-handling improvements, with the ability to keep or discard formatting when cutting and pasting from other applications and to directly convert paragraph text to curves while maintaining formatting such as justification and bullets. This is useful as it allows you to then apply effects such as graduated transparencies to your text.

Import and export filters have been updated, including an enhanced Micrografx/Corel Designer DSF import that supports layers, fills and text formatting, an enhanced Photoshop PSD export that supports layers and transparent backgrounds and an enhanced Acrobat PDF engine supporting symbols, transparency types and mesh fills.

So what's the final verdict? A market-leading solution doesn't become a bad choice overnight and there's still a vast amount of power in the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite box. Having said this, DRAW has been desperately treading water for the last few releases and now it's definitely getting weaker. Even worse, what little development there has been was focused on R.A.V.E. and PHOTO-PAINT - satellite applications that many users won't even install. Without a cutting edge, there's little reason to upgrade and advanced users will look elsewhere. There's more to attract the mid-range user, but, if the latest features really aren't important, why not choose Corel's cut-down and excellent-value Essentials?

It wasn't too long ago that Corel was advertising the CorelDRAW Graphics suite as 'the choice of the professionals'. Sadly, it's getting increasingly hard to make that case.