Labs

CorelDraw is the standard against which other PC drawing programs are judged. It's available only with the Graphics Suite, which includes Photo-Paint and Corel Rave 3, a motion graphics package.

In many respects, CorelDraw's feature list matches those of Illustrator and FreeHand. It can deal with DTP as well as general design. It's fully conversant with CMYK, overprinting and other prepress requirements and can output to PDF and PostScript files and print colour separations.

A wide range of raster and vector effects are available and can be edited in an Object Manager. A separate module, Corel Trace, converts bitmap images into vector shapes. You can create gradient mesh fills like Illustrator's and smart connector lines like FreeHand's. Shapes can be extruded into 3D objects with shared vanishing points, as in FreeHand, but with more lighting and bevelling options. Like Illustrator, CorelDraw is scriptable.

This version offers more. Smart Drawing analyses your freehand squiggles and converts what you actually drew (a mess) into what you meant to draw (usually a square, circle or triangle). Dynamic Guides match their equivalents in Illustrator, making it easy to align objects as you draw

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them.

In short, CorelDraw seems to be the ideal all-round graphics package - until you use it. A simple task such as creating a named colour and applying it to an object can defeat even the most experienced graphics user, and the onscreen Help rarely provides a meaningful answer. Bezier curve drawing is harder than in Illustrator and FreeHand thanks to a lack of keyboard short cuts, and even selecting objects is frustrating. The user interface feels hopelessly cluttered and options are often duplicated in different locations.

CorelDraw stresses its vast number of import and export formats, but translating complex vector-based content is a tricky business and the results are not always accurate. Exporting a PDF will never be as reliable or customisable as it is from Adobe software, and printers are less likely to be able to supply their job specs in CorelDraw's format.

The new features are not that numerous. As for Smart Draw, it's a solution in search of a problem: it's much quicker and easier to click the Ellipse tool and drag to draw a circle than to rough it out freehand and hope the software recognises it.

What CorelDraw offers over cheaper programs such as Serif DrawPlus 7 is scalability. Once you've worked out how to use it, you won't suddenly run up against its limitations when you try something ambitious. Rave is fine for animated or interactive graphics and is easier to learn than Flash. Photo-Paint suffers from the same kind of idiosyncrasies as Draw, but again covers a broad base of functions up to a basic professional level.

As it costs less than Adobe Illustrator alone, CorelDraw Graphics Suite is good enough value to make you overlook its shortcomings. Compared with Adobe Creative Suite 2, it's around half the price, which seems about right.