Review - Corel is about to release a new version of its “Draw” graphics suite, which is one of the very few remaining complete graphics suites on the market. Now in its 14th generation, it hasn’t lost its original look and feel and remains the most convincing PC graphics product for ambitious consumers and graphic artists.   

Sometimes at the beginning of this decade, just when Corel went through a tough time, the company’s core product somehow lost its appeal. It was Draw that had made Corel famous in the early 90s and it was pretty much Draw that carried the Ottawa-based firm through that decade. But, beginning with version 6, Draw became visibly bloated and Corel looked like it had lost its focus. I personally felt the reasons for an upgrade to a new version were fading and that is why my most current Draw package in use is still v10 (released in 2000).

Version 14, in Corel language “X4”, has made its way to the Gold Master disc a few weeks ago and I had a chance to take a first look over the past week. Here’s my impression.


What you get

Besides the core product of the graphics suite, the CorelDraw vector graphics software, there’s a new version of the photo editing application Photo Paint, an updated version of the screenshot tool Capture, a new Bitstream font manager (Draw now integrates the font identification tool WhatTheFont), Trace (which converts bitmaps into vector graphics), the Service Bureau Profiler to prepare graphics for professional prints, a Duplexing wizard and a new online collaboration software called ConceptShare. Included are also a font collection and 10,000 clipart images.

If you aren’t familiar with CorelDraw, this package basically delivers a professional vector graphics software that is comparable to Adobe’s Illustrator and comes with basic desktop publishing (DTP) capabilities as well as a consumer-oriented bitmap editing application (Photo Paint) that is not quite as flexible and powerful as Adobe’s Photoshop. I’ll be focusing mostly on CorelDraw in this article, since it is the main reason why users - Corel says that its customer base ranges from design professionals in print and advertising to “occasional graphics users” - will buy this package.

The full version of CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 sells for $429 MSRP.

What you don’t get

Up until version 4 (released in 1993), the suite included a fantastic Chart creation application called “CorelChart”; it is somewhat surprising to me that this software has never been brought back to life since then. A presentation component called “Show” was also part until version 4 and has been integrated more or less in Draw since then. Draw is an excellent software to create presentations, but interestingly, the new X4 can only import PowerPoint files, but not export into this format.

Also noteworthy is that the DTP software Ventura, which was part of CorelDraw 5, is still sold by Corel as a separate program for $599 (full version). So, if you are interested in creating simple newsletters, Draw is a sufficient solution, but if you are looking for multipage newsletters and more, Ventura or a competing software such as Adobe’s InDesign is what you should be looking for.

Read on the next page: Look and feel of CorelDraw X4, New features