CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 review

3D Pdf?

Does it support 3D Pdf?

By IanBroughton on 5 Mar 2010

Roaming Profile

Does the Thumbnail Preview still cause problems to a roaming profile, as the stored preview files names are too long?

By IanBroughton on 5 Mar 2010

Draw doesn't support true 3D itself so no. The normal workflow if you want to embed a 3D model in a PDF is to create your publication as a PDF and then to import the model in Acrobat Pro Extended.

No idea about the roaming profile issue. I'd suggest downloading the free trial and checking it yourself.

By TomArah on 5 Mar 2010

Adobe formats?

Does it support Illustrator brushes / styles / swatches etc format or corel Photo-Paint support brushes ABR, Photoshop custom shapes CSH etc? now that would be useful (for me anyway) Also perhaps TUB / psptube from corel PaintShop Pro X3 ? Must check the trial version but I suspect probably not on those formats.
Andrew

By Andrew713 on 5 Mar 2010

Hi Andrew. Draw 5 has seriously improved the number of artistic brushes that it provides but they are stored as individual CMX files (the best that I can think of to convert them is to drag on your brush, copy and paste from Illustrator to Draw, quick trace it and save to CMX). No equivalents to styles or swatches (apart from flat colour palettes).

Couldn't see any support for ABR or CSH in PhotoPaint but there is an image sprayer tool - it doesn't mention TUB specifically but you can load any bitmap and specify a grid to create the spray list.

Hope this helps but again you're probably better off downloading the trial.

By TomArah on 5 Mar 2010

Handling larger Files

Not mentioned in the review is the fact that it has been recompiled to use multicore CPU's. X4 could not handle files above 100MB without grinding to a halt, X5 can. This allows you to handle + A3 paper size files. A big plus.

By Neil_S on 6 Mar 2010

Font Handling

I've across mixed reactions to X5's ability to work with Open Type fonts and also for how the bundled Bitstream Font Navigator works with Type 1 fonts under Windows 7, was there anything you came across Tom that you think people should be aware of or have been improved?

By John_C on 9 Mar 2010

To be fair...

I know a lot of effort went into core code on this release. You can see just a glimpse of that in multi-threading for saving and printing. Then complete rewrite of CM... with new layers in PP and layers with master pages added in X4. The X series is setting the stage for a much more powerful platform. They have done well but they do have more to do. I think that is OK, they are still the closest to a competitor of Adobe and size wise Adobe sacked X6 Corel's total staff last year. That's one hell of a development effort for a relatively small team.

By akayani on 11 Mar 2010

CorelDraw upgrade

I have CD Graphics Suite 12 installed but have long lost the discs can I upgrade to X5 and do I need the original disks to do so? I obviously have my curent serial number

By EnglishBird on 2 Jun 2010

X5 crash within 15 minutes with custom made profiles

On a windows 7 64 bit system with 24 mb of physical ram / 4x3.20 Mhz Processor, the trial crasheds after 15 minutes test drive when using professional color profiles. The error message was a "out of memory" warning which makes Corel freezes. This happened when copying and pasting an 8 mb image from Photoshop into an empty corel document. The previous versions of corel had major bugs when using professional color profiles, but at least we could go around these bugs by deleting the user files every time a documents "gets corrupted" as corel support would say.
This version seems to have newer bugs with the color profile module for which we have not yet found an easy solution to go around. (the same color profiles do not cause any problems with the Adobe suite). Our conclusion was that version X4 was a safer version to use to avoid loosing documents because of software bugs.

By andie on 13 Jul 2010

X5 crash within 15 minutes with custom made profiles

erratum... 24 Gb of physical Ram

By andie on 13 Jul 2010

Amazon Deal

I just ordered CorelDraw X5 on Amazon.co.uk, they are doing a great deal the upgrade cost me £85.

By lukemcurley on 15 Sep 2010