Product Reviews

At one point, Micrografx Designer and CorelDRAW had the world of PC-based vector graphics pretty much to themselves, with Micrografx taking care of technical drawing and Corel concentrating on graphic design. Since then, competition has arrived from the Mac and market share has fallen. Now Corel has swallowed its former rival and this is the first major release since the takeover. So is it good news for Designer's long-suffering users?

Well, after the disappointment of version 9, they're certainly in for a shock. To begin with, the interface is unrecognisable and existing users simply won't know what's hit them. CorelDRAW users will be rather more familiar with the new environment, immediately recognising its context-sensitive property bar for controlling tools and no less than 23 docker windows for controlling everything else.

In fact, there are only two obvious indicators that you're working in Designer rather than CorelDRAW. The first is that your cursor is constantly giving feedback on underlying objects and snapping to their paths, mid-points, quadrants, tangents and so on. The second is that Designer offers a slightly different toolbox: two icons wide and with alternatives appearing at the bottom rather than as fly-outs.

So just what power is on offer? Existing Designer users will be most interested in the more technical functionality, and there's plenty to choose from (again almost all of it familiar to CorelDRAW users). Designer's Dimension tools are used for marking up precise measurements and include horizontal, vertical and parallel options, plus one for marking up angles. The Callout tool lets you automatically pick out object properties, or you can add your own text. More advanced features include the ability to automatically increment values and produce callouts with up to three line segments.

Another common use for Micrografx's Designer is the production of flow diagrams, and there are changes here too. The former Sticky Line tool, for creating lines that follow the objects to which they're linked, has been replaced by the Connector Line tools, which again offer up to three segments. Completely new for Micrografx Designer users are Corel's Perfect Shape tools that let you add common diagrammatic symbols with built-in editing intelligence. Designer 10 also ships with thousands of industry-standard architectural, electrical and mechanical symbols for use as building blocks. These can now be handled via a dedicated Symbol Manager docker, which is ideal if you need

Further technical drawing strengths become apparent when it comes to editing your work. Designer 10 provides powerful ways of combining objects and shape editing. The Shape tool's Reflect Nodes options are totally new and allow you to mirror changes around a horizontal or vertical axis. Equally handy is the new ability to divide lines into equal segments and the Virtual Segment Delete tool, which trims line segments back to the nearest intersection. Most useful of all will be the Transformation Docker window, where you can take precise and centralised control of positioning, rotation, scaling and skewing. It can now produce isometric projections too.

But it's the new creative power that really brings Corel's experience to the fore. In the past, Designer's formatting capabilities were reasonable but tended towards the technical, with a strong bias towards hatching patterns and dashed lines. Designer 10 offers all of CorelDRAW's formatting controls including access to Pantone libraries, fractal fills and so on. There's even the Gradient Mesh tool for adding PostScript-friendly graduated shading.

It's the same story when it comes to special effects, with all of CorelDRAW's interactive effect tools on offer. The Extrusion tool will be of most interest to the target audience, as it provides the ability to bring 2D drawings into 3D, or at least pseudo-3D. Other options include the interactive Blend, Contour, Transparency, Drop Shadow and Envelope tools. Corel clearly thought that adding CorelDRAW's art-based Artistic Media brushes would be a step too far so it's given them some spurious technical respectability by renaming them as Linear Patterns.

As always with Corel, there's more in the box than just the main application. Particularly useful is the inclusion of the Trace utility, which converts scanned bitmaps to vectors. I'm also a big fan of Bitstream's Font Navigator for taking control of your fonts, plus the support for Visual Basic for Applications means Designer can now be used for fully automated workflows. The major downside is that Picture Publisher is no longer bundled, so you'll need a separate bitmap editor.

All told, there's a vast amount for Micrografx Designer users to get to grips with. Corel is doing its best to obscure the fact that ultimately Designer 10 isn't actually a new release of the long-standing Micrografx application; it's more a competitive upgrade to a tweaked version of CorelDRAW. Corel's developers have simply taken CorelDRAW, dropped certain functionality such as the print preview and Photo-Paint effects, and then tweaked the interface and the odd tool to give a slightly more technical feel.

Many Micrografx Designer users will be horrified at the unacknowledged demise of their favoured solution, while others will be amazed at how much new power they can now access. Whichever camp you fall into, if you need a technical drawing program Corel Designer 10 is the best option available - after all, Micrografx Designer is dead.