Product Reviews

After 11 versions at the forefront of vector and bitmap graphics on the PC, what could Corel possibly include in CorelDraw Graphics Suite that would make it worth upgrading? CorelDraw 11, which we tested in Labs last month ('Drawing Inspiration', March 2004), is the best drawing application available, and Photo-Paint 11 - the painting application in the previous Graphics Suite - isn't bad either.

Surprisingly, Corel has announced that it will not be supporting the Mac from now on, so the first change in version 12 is that it is for Windows 2000 or XP only.

The most obvious new feature in CorelDraw 12 is the Smart Drawing tool, as it's the only new main tool in the box. If you use this to draw a rough circle after a short delay it suddenly snaps into a perfect circle. It also recognises the full range of built-in objects - rectangles, circles, ellipses and so on - and it converts anything it doesn't recognise into smoother curves and straighter lines than you actually drew. This is an attractive but, it must be said, hardly essential feature. It's certainly quick to use, but for more precise results the dedicated tools are still the way forward. However, if you want the freedom to draw freehand you might find shape recognition a good way to clean up your first efforts.

Other improvements are less prominent but more worthwhile. Dynamic guides sound boring, but they make a huge difference to drawing. As you drag an object about the screen, temporary guides appear as the object you are dragging comes into alignment with other objects. The distance along the guide is also displayed as you move along it. Object snapping has also been improved

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in that you can now snap to various points on another object, and text appears to tell you what the alignment is: centre, top or bottom.

The other drawing enhancements are minor by comparison: improved text alignment and rendering; easier object property copying; better three-point drawing tools; and enhanced symbols. A new editing pointer that will make many types of drawing easier is the Virtual Segment Delete tool. If you place two objects so that they intersect, any lines in one that are cut by the other can be deleted. You can think of this as a sort of manual hidden line removal procedure, and it makes 3D effects easier to achieve.

Other improvements include better scalable vector graphics (SVG), which is fast becoming the standard way of including drawings in web pages; specialised export for Office applications; and file compatibility with AutoCad and other technical formats. It also now has full support for Unicode, which makes working in different languages easier.

Draw isn't the only application in the CorelDraw Suite. Turning to the other applications in Graphics Suite 12, PhotoPaint has been given a number of slight improvements, the most notable being the new touch-up brush. This effective tool makes it easy to correct minor problems on digital photos such as scratch marks, dust marks and wrinkles. It seems to work by performing a smart blur of the image that you paint over, which is simple but effective. Rave, the animation program, has all of the improvements in CorelDraw, which it uses as its drawing tool, but there seem to be no changes to the animation features.

The list of exciting new features in Graphics Suite 12 may seem a little short, but this is partly a reflection of the maturity of the product; CorelDraw is still the best drawing program available. If you want to create SVG graphics, upgrading to version 12 is worth the £217 asking price for improvements in this area alone. For general use the better snapping, dynamic guides and virtual segment deletion will save you time and make the upgrade worthwhile. Although version 12 won't let you do much more than 11, you will almost certainly do it quicker. If you still use version 10 or earlier, it's definitely a good idea to upgrade to 12.