Fifteen years ago, each new release of CorelDRAW was a major event in the world of PC graphics, but then Corel took its eye off the ball and allowed Adobe to take over. Now under new management, with a renewed focus on graphics and rival Freehand out of the way, and with the last X3 release the best in years, there’s something of the old anticipation about this latest launch.

So what’s new? Well, naturally, as with every past launch, the CorelDRAW interface sports a new look, although this just boils down to little more than redesigned icons and less cramped toolbars. One area of the interface that’s been reworked is the Welcome Screen, which now offers tabbed access to help with new features, a gallery showing sample images and, for the first time, integrated update information. It’s the main Quick Start pane that matters, though, and this has been revamped to show larger, full-colour thumbnail previews of recently opened files.

The Quick Start pane also offers quick access to the ‘New from template’ dialog, which has also been redesigned and provides a much wider range of 80 options, organised into categories such as brochures and business cards. CorelDRAW X4 also offers a dedicated ‘Save as template’ command to add your own designs to the options available. And to help you quickly locate the design you’re looking for, the ‘New from template’ dialog includes a search box, with which you can find options based on author, keywords and so on.

Of course, to find your own templates in this way, you’ll need to add keyword and descriptive data yourself, and CorelDRAW X4’s Save dialogs now encourage this by default. The use of searchable metadata really comes into its own when working on Vista systems, as this lets you find matching artwork across all indexed locations on your hard disk. Vista users also benefit from X4’s larger, higher quality thumbnails and from support for Explorer’s preview pane, which lets you zoom in on artwork and see previews of all pages.

Improved file support
It isn’t just file handling that’s been improved: so has the range of supported file formats. Corel has added support for its own Painter X files and makes use of its development work on Paint Shop Pro Photo and Designer to add support for RAW and AutoCAD DXF and DWG formats. In addition, X4 adds import support for the latest Microsoft Word 2007 files and, for the first time, Publisher PUB files (2002, 2003 and 2007 versions). Most significantly, CorelDRAW X4 adds updated import and export support for the latest versions of Adobe’s Photoshop PSD and Acrobat PDF standards, and now lets you base colour management handling on Adobe’s freely downloadable Color Management Module (CMM).

In a boost to its drawing power, CorelDRAW X4 builds on X3’s introduction of the PowerTRACE capability for direct bitmap-to-vector conversion. You can now right-click to quickly access tracing presets, for example. For greater control, you simply call up the dialog, and this now adds improved options for handling smoothing and corners, as well as the ability to redefine, merge or delete output colours. Most importantly, X4’s PowerTRACE now adds support for centre line as well as outline tracing. This is essential when you’re attempting to recreate technical illustrations, as it means each traced line is output as a single, easily editable path rather than as an inflexible outlined stroke.
Even with these improvements, CorelDRAW’s PowerTRACE is still no match in terms of power and speed for Illustrator’s Live Trace capability, but it’s a great addition to your graphical toolkit.

Where tracing usually falls down is with text, as to recreate readable and editable characters you need to have access to the original font, and working out the typeface you need is difficult. CorelDRAW X4’s “WhatTheFont?!..” command makes this ludicrously easy: just choose the command, draw a selection box around your text and the resulting screen capture is automatically sent off to MyFont.com, where an online wizard quickly helps you indentify the typeface ready for purchase and download. Of course, the main credit for this solution belongs to MyFont, and you don’t need CorelDRAW to take advantage of it, but it’s handy having it integrated like this.

CorelDRAW X4 has lots to offer when it comes to handling typefaces, starting with its included fonts. The new version provides over 1000 OpenType fonts, which can be quickly viewed, installed and uninstalled using the bundled copy of Bitstream Font Navigator 2006. Most impressive of all is the live text preview. Select some text, open the typeface drop-down on the Character docker and, as you hold your mouse over an installed font, your text’s typeface automatically updates so you can rapidly explore what various options would look like in situ.


Other text-based advances include the ability to mirror text blocks horizontally and vertically, better quotation mark handling and improvements to its print merge capability. Most striking is the new support for table handling via an interactive Table tool and new dedicated Table menu and property bar. These offer all the expected commands for merging and splitting cells, inserting rows and columns, managing borders and so on. It’s easier to manage text tables like this, but the fact that the resulting grid is fixed and doesn’t adapt to its content is a major limitation. On the other hand, you can place design elements in cells so there are graphical uses to which the tables can be put.

Merge into one
CorelDRAW X4’s text handling is improved, then, but it still lags behind Illustrator’s. There’s one exception to this: unlike Illustrator, CorelDRAW offers multiple page handling. This is a massive advantage, not just for publications such as brochures, but also when trying out different concepts. In the past, the way CorelDRAW did this was confusing: when you added a layer to one page, an empty version appeared on all others. Now, using X4’s revamped Object Manager, you can add layers independently to each page. In addition, it means you can now add non-printing guideline layers tailored to each page, reserving the master page for layers and guidelines you want to see throughout your project.

So far, X4 has provided a range of enhancements, but, with the honourable exception of live text preview, none breaks significant new ground. The only introductions that seem to fit the bill are X4’s new web-hosted collaboration and review capabilities. These are handled through the new ConceptShare docker: from this location, you can sign up to the service (another third-party-developed feature) and then post your designs, which are organised into workspaces containing multiple concepts. Other users can then be invited to view the concepts, post comments and even chat about the artwork in real-time.

The elephant in the room is Adobe PDF, which has provided a platform for electronic collaboration and review for the past 15 years, and which CorelDRAW has long supported. Admittedly, PDF’s longstanding round-robin approach isn’t as efficient as a centralised web-based solution, but that’s why the latest Acrobat Professional 8 enables web-based review using the latest free Adobe Reader. Pitched against a freely available established and superior standard – behind the scenes ConceptShare rasterizes all posted artwork to JPEG – we can’t see many taking it up.

Over its 14 releases, the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite has built up enough power to keep most occasional professional users happy. With its multiple page support and its bundled templates, clip-art, fonts and copy of Photo-Paint (see below), it offers some real advantages over the market-leading Illustrator. And for new, non-professional users, X4 is probably the better choice, as it offers most of Illustrator’s design power without its high-end complexity and cost. Persuading its occasional non-professional users that they should upgrade, however, requires delivering both a little excitement and some real tangible benefits.