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CorelDRAW 9
by By: Paul Kurivchack—October 2000 PPCUG News, Princeton PC Users Group - December 02, 2000 at 00:58:40:
It is quite amazing how over the years CorelDRAW has changed while remaining the same. I started out using CorelDRAW 3.0, thinking what a great product this is in comparison to what was available back in those days. I moved to CorelDRAW 5 and felt that while it was still a good product, it became excessively complex for the casual user with the floating roll up tool bars and such. Now finally moving up to CorelDRAW 9, I see the simplicity of CorelDRAW 3 with the power to create anything from simple line drawings to complex works of art without spending days learning the product.I place a lot of value on the intuitiveness of a prod-uct and ease of use. It is one thing if you are a graphic designer and spend all day working with only a couple of applications. For many of us, we probably have 50 or more applications loaded on our PC’s and when the time comes to use a product with the depth of Corel DRAW, can we even remember how to draw a straight line. The answer is yes with CorelDRAW 9. It is easy and fun to use, includes creative tools that allow even the most uncreative to produce good-look-ing work.
The Product—CorelDRAW 9 Graphics Suite includes CorelDRAW 9, Photo-Paint 9 (to be reviewed next month), Corel Texture, Corel-Trace 9, Corel Capture, 25,000 clipart images, 1000 high-rez photos, 1000 True Type & Type 1 fonts and a number of utilities for managing digital media and fonts.
Hardware requirements are a modest Pentium 133 MHz with 32 MB RAM running Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0. The evalua-tion and testing was done on a Pentium III 450 MHz with 256 MB RAM running Windows 98 2nd Edition, so screen refresh was quite fast. I did notice that running some of the image en-hancement tools even the 450 MHz seem slow, taking 30 to 60 seconds to do the enhancement. I can just imagine the time to do that on a 133 MHz PC.
I have become a true believer in using the Custom Install when available. Not that I change much, but more to be nosey and see exactly what is being installed. To conserve space I left out the tutorials and some filters I will never use. Only one hang up occurred during the install. It was with the fonts. I already have 591 fonts installed and CorelDRAW generated an error statement that I was well over the 500 font recommended maximum limit so I could not install any additional fonts. At 591 I am not sure that I am missing too many. Therefore, without any further problems CorelDRAW 9 installed completely and is very stable.
The Interface—CorelDRAW 9 starts out with an array of tool bars positioned around the perimeter of the workspace. No floating tool bars! I spend as much time in PageMaker moving the floating tool bars around as I do actual work. CorelDRAW has the standard winows tool bar menus at the top, the drawing tools on the left and the color bar to the right and lastly a Properties tool bar. Everything is laid out for easy access and precise drawing control.
For any of the special menu items such as Arrange, Effects, Text or Tools selected from the standard tool bar, once selected another window appears on the right side providing a whole host of features and options for easy selection. One thing that is interesting when working in this area is a list of Last Used tools. This is quite handy if you are experimenting with the tools and stumble on a technique that is nice, the program remembers it for use later in the drawing. No longer do you have to try to remember how that was done. It is there in the Last Used window. Again, everything is very intuitive.
If the tool has additional options indicated by an arrow in the lower right corner, simply left mouse click on the tool icon and a popup menu appears with the options which stays open after releasing the mouse. It just does not disappear like in most windows applications (something borrowed from the MAC).
The Properties Tool Bar is by far the most interesting and powerful that I have seen. It changes on the fly to provide pre-cise X-Y coordinates, object size in measurement and, as a per-cent, plus a host of other control functions for an object or text. If precision is a requirement in creating a document, all the tools needed are at your fingertips.
The Tools—Standard tools include the Pick, for selecting objects and manipulating them and the Shape tool for performing further detailed manipulation. The Artistic Media tool, for drawing lines, includes straight, bezier curves and auto connection lines for Org Charts. Drawing a line has never been easier. I remember trying to draw smooth curved lines in earlier versions and no matter how hard I tried to control the mouse it was no use. With CorelDRAW 9, drawing curves is a breeze.
The Rectangle, Ellipse and Polygon tools do exactly what their name indicates, allow you to draw squares, circles and multisided objects. With a little practice, these simple elements can become very exotic objects just using the Pick or Shape tools. If you add the Interactive Mesh or Distortion tools, the possibilities are endless.
Add color to the objects using the color palette with the mul-titude of colors, fill patterns and transparencies and the sky is the limit to the possibilities. A few years back, when black and white printing was the norm, color was not as important as it is today. Even if you publish a newsletter in B&W, if it is being placed on a web site, color brings a completely new meaning to the document and CorelDRAW 9 gives you the needed tools.
Text handling is vastly improved over earlier versions. The standard text frame is still used and editing is on screen as com-pared to an editing window. Font manipulation is performed either from the Properties tool bar or by the Tools menu. Once the menu is selected, a pop up window appears with the text options of Font, Align, Space, Tabs, Frames & Columns, and Effects. This is one of the few times a independent pop up win-dow appears, but if you are fortunate to be running Windows 98 or 2000 with multiple monitors, the window can be dragged off to the second monitor away from the drawing page and all adjustments can be made in real time. If you only have one monitor, well now you have to play, move the floating window out of the way (If you are doing any serious graphics work.)
Image Editing—CorelDRAW 9 includes an arm length list of image editing and enhancement tools. The standard photo sharpening, noise, blur are there along with some interesting effects such as 3-D, Art Strokes (convert to crayon or charcoal plus others), color transform, creative and a bunch more. Included in the CorelDRAW 9 package is Corel Photo-Paint, photo-editing application (To be reviewed next month), to Corel Trace, for making line tracings of bitmapped images.
Conclusion—As I stated in the beginning, I have been using CorelDRAW products for a very long time. CorelDRAW 9 is a wonderful drawing application. It provides the right mix of tools in an easy to use format. Granted, CorelDRAW 9 is a high-end software application aimed at the professional graphic designer, but even amateurs can find CorelDRAW 9 easy and fun to use.
Visit http://www.corel.com for additional information and pricing for CorelDraw 9 and all the other Corel products.
A special thank you to Laura McElwain, User Group Programs Manager for her support of the Princeton PC Users Group and providing this evalulation copy of CorelDRAW 9.
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