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Corel ships CorelDRAW 10 Suite

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for Nov. 30, 2000

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2000

It has been an interesting year for Ottawa-based Corel Corp. It was probably a combination of factors that saw company founder, Dr. Michael Cowpland, step down earlier this year - but comments such as, "I don't see a reason why Corel should be profitable when all other Linux companies are losing money," made during the company's first quarter financial report last March, probably didn't help.

In the interim, Derek J. Burney was named the new president and CEO last month, following on the heels of an announcement that Corel and Microsoft had signed a strategic partnership deal to work on Microsoft's .NET project, in exchange for which Microsoft forks over $135 million for 24 million convertible non-voting Corel shares.

How times change.

All this is by way of introducing this week's topic: the release of the CorelDRAW 10 suite, Corel's flagship application.

How Suite it is: Corel has changed the mix of applications in its suite with almost every release and 10 is no exception. The core programs, CorelDRAW 10 and PhotoPaint 10 are still present, but there's a new major partner in the mix, Corel R.A.V.E. 1.0 - an animation tool that creates Macromedia Flash inserts for Web pages based on vector drawings.

What R.A.V.E. gives Web authors is another way to create movement in a Web page, in addition to animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) files and Windows AVI or Apple QuickTime "movies" based on bitmap (raster) images (all of which can be created in PhotoPaint). In essence, R.A.V.E. duplicates the CorelDRAW 10 tools and controls. My suspicion is that it could be rolled into the main drawing program in a later release.

Old Standbys: Both CorelDRAW (the vector program) and PhotoPaint (the image editor) have been trading options since version 8. You can convert a DRAW document or object to bitmap, or simply import it into PhotoPaint. You can also import a bitmap into CorelDRAW and continue to work on it because there's a full set of bitmap editing tools.

All this hopping back and forth would be tedious in the extreme if the two main programs didn't share the same menu and tool structures and Corel has steadily improved both so that the interface is, given that they both have different primary tool sets, as close to being the same as the programmers can make it. The interface is heavily customizable and you can save your "workspace" for later retrieval.

New in DRAW: Most of the enhancements to CorelDRAW 10 are under the skin. Experienced users won't notice a lot of difference up front over version 9. However, at least one new feature, Real Time Preview, has made its way into the suite from WordPerfect. Now when you use a menu of formatting choices, you can, if you pause the cursor over the choice before selecting it, see what will happen to the object selected - for example, changing the position of text along a curved path.

There's also a new main tool - Perfect Shapes gives you a palette of pre-set geometric shapes, arrows, stars, callouts, and flowchart shapes as a function separate from the standard rectangles or ellipses.

Somehow, it never occurs to me to use CorelDRAW for multi-page documents, but for those who do, there's a new page sorter to help you manage page order.

Last, but not least, there's a whole new routine for managing multiple languages. For example, you can now enter text in multiple languages in the same text box, and depending on which spelling and grammar tools are active, the program will check and correct text using the language specified by the user.

New in PhotoPaint: There have been more obvious improvements in PhotoPaint 10 than in DRAW. Being able to fit text on a path has been added, as well as a new text anti-aliasing routine optimized for small point-sizes (where there's a slightly lighter edge added to improve apparent crispness). Corel has also added a new effect, top highlight, that is particularly effective in sizes under 12 points.

PhotoPaint also gets Real Time Preview (see above) and its interactive Drop Shadow tool now works the same way as the tool does in CorelDRAW.

When I reviewed Jasc Paint Shop Pro recently, I made much of its use of layers for adjusting elements such as brightness and contrast and that by turning the layers on or off, as well as stacking them, you could see the effects of changes without having to commit to them - allowing lots of "what-if" playing about. Corel hasn't gone quite that far, but it does now allow you to view or hide specific objects within an image.

Corel has also added an automated red-eye removal routine, but it makes no distinction between people (whose eyes do come up red sometimes) and animals (more likely to have "green-eye") as Jasc does. You won't find PhotoPaint's routine as easy to use. Corel has also added a "Smart Blur" feature which, the company says, "...lets users create images with sharp edges and blurred contents," along with greater control over the degree to which images are blurred.

PhotoPaint also has a new and noteworthy Web optimization tool that allows Web authors to have an extremely fine degree of control over the images to be used on a Web page. The interactive tool allows you to see what the final output will be in its original file format, GIF, JPEG, or PNG (Portable Network Graphic), as well as all the current variations allowed in each format. What it does not do, and Jasc's Animation Shop 3 does, is to optimize animated GIF files so that they take up less space (and therefore load more quickly).

By accident, I found out about another new feature, when the PhotoPaint Web optimization subroutine got fed up with what I was asking it to do. A window popped up, notifying me that the program had gone unstable. I was offered the choice of saving all current work, bailing out, or trying to continue. I should have saved, then bailed, instead of pushing on. One forced hardware reset later... Nevertheless, it's a good little item to have (and I wish more software would come with a similar tool).

Other bits and pieces: In addition to the main elements in the CorelDRAW 10 suite, there are quite a few other utilities. Corel Capture 10 has added the ability to grab only menus or toolbars, along with whole screens, active windows, child windows, freehand screen sections, and others.

Corel Texture 10 allows you to create, save, and re-use bitmapped textures for use in any of the main modules. CorelTRACE 10 attempts to translate raster bitmaps into editable vector files.

Non-Corel addins include: Canto Cumulus Desktop LE 5.0, yet another visual graphic file management utility, largely not needed for those with the thumbnail views available through Windows 98 SE or better; Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.02 (for viewing PDF document files from the Internet); Bitstream Font Navigator 4.0 (better font management than Windows provides); Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications 6.0, and; an Internet link to Apple's QuickTime (you need version 3.02 or better to render PhotoPaint animations to QuickTime).

And as always, there are 1,000 fonts (TrueType and Type 1), 28,000 clipart and image files, and 1,000 high-resolution photos.

More info: To use the CorelDRAW 10 suite, you need at least a 200 MHz Pentium processor, 64 MB of memory (128 recommended), 160 MB of hard drive space (up to over 375 MB to load everything), and Windows 98 or later.

Corel no longer publishes Canadian pricing at its Web site; the full price for a new user from the company's WebStore ( www.corel.com ) is US$569.99, while the upgrade price is US$249.99. You'll also find a $100 mail-in rebate coupon in the box for those upgrading or switching from a long list of products. However, I have been able to find it online from Canadian suppliers for just over $600 for the full package (although there appears also to be an unboxed edition with no coupon for about $500) and at $229 for the upgrade (from any version of CorelDRAW from 3 to 9).

And finally, you need the patience of a saint to register the suite online. I tried; I really did; but the registration Web site's server is so slooow, I finally gave up after nearly a half-hour of waiting for pages to refresh over a high-speed connection. I suspect Corel is going to lose a lot of registrations until it gets the problem fixed.

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