At one point, Micrografx Designer and CorelDRAW had the world of PC vector graphics mostly to themselves, Micrografx took care of technical drawing and Corel concentrated on graphic design. Since then, competition has arrived from Mac and market share has fallen. Corel has swallowed its former rival and this is the first major release since the takeover. So is it good news for Designer's long-suffering users?

Well, after the disappointment of Version 9, they're certainly in for a shock. To begin with, the interface is unrecognisable and existing users simply won't know what's hit them. CorelDRAW users will be more familiar with the environment, immediately recognising its context-sensitive property bar for controlling tools and no less than 23 docker windows for controlling everything else.
 
In fact, there's only two obvious indicators that you're working in Designer rather than CorelDRAW. The first is your cursor is constantly giving feedback on underlying objects and snapping to their paths, mid-points, quadrants, tangents and so on. The second is that Designer offers a slightly different toolbox: two icons wide, with alternatives appearing at the bottom rather than as fly-outs.

So just what power is on offer? Designer users will be most interested in the more technical functionality, and there's plenty to choose from (again almost all of it familiar to CorelDRAW users). Designer's Dimension tools are used for marking up precise measurements including horizontal, vertical and parallel options, plus one for marking up angles. The Callout tool lets you automatically pick out object properties, or add your own text. More advanced features include the ability to automatically increment values and produce callouts with up to three line segments.

Another common use for Designer is the production of flow diagrams, and there are changes here too. The former Sticky Line tool, for creating lines that follow their linked objects, has been replaced by the Connector Line tools, which again offer up to three segments. Completely new are Corel's Perfect Shape tools that let you add diagrammatic symbols with built-in editing intelligence. Designer 10 also ships with thousands of architectural, electrical and mechanical symbols for use as building blocks. Now handled via a dedicated Symbol Manager docker, it is ideal if you need to update multiple instances or save your drawing to a Flash SWF file for Web viewing.
 
Further technical drawing strengths become apparent when editing your work. Designer 10 provides powerful ways of combining objects and shape editing. The Shape tool's Reflect Nodes options allow you to mirror changes around a horizontal or vertical axis. Equally handy is the ability to divide lines into equal segments and the Virtual Segment Delete tool trims line segments back to the nearest intersection. Most useful of all is the Transformation Docker window, where you can take precise and centralised control of scaling, positioning, rotation and skewing.

But it's the creative power that brings Corel's experience to the fore. In the past, Designer's formatting capabilities were reasonable but tended towards the technical, with a bias towards hatching patterns and dashed lines. It offers CorelDRAW's formatting controls including Pantone libraries, fractal fills and even the Gradient Mesh tool for PostScript graduated shading.

It's the same with special effects, all of CorelDRAW's interactive effect tools are on offer. The Extrusion tool will be of most interest to the target audience, providing the ability to bring 2D drawings into 3D, or at least pseudo-3D. Other options include the interactive Blend, Contour, Transparency, Drop Shadow and Envelope tools. Corel clearly thought adding CorelDRAW's art-based Artistic Media brushes would be a step too far so gave them technical respectability by renaming them as Linear Patterns.

As always with Corel, there's more in the box than just the main application. Particularly useful is the Trace utility, which converts scanned bitmaps to vectors. I'm also a fan of Bitstream's Font Navigator taking control of your fonts, plus support for Visual Basic for Applications means it can now be used for automated workflows. The major downside is that Picture Publisher is not included so you'll need a separate bitmap editor.

All told, there's a vast amount for Micrografx Designer users to learn. Corel is doing its best to obscure the fact that Designer 10 isn't a new release of the long-standing Micrografx; it's more a competitive upgrade to a tweaked version of CorelDRAW. Corel's developers have simply taken CorelDRAW, dropped certain functionality such as print preview and Photo-Paint effects, then tweaked the interface and the odd tool to give a slightly more technical feel.

Many Micrografx Designer users will be horrified at the unacknowledged demise of their favoured solution, while others will be amazed at how much new power they can access. Whichever camp you fall into, if you need a technical drawing program Corel Designer 10 is the best option available – after all, Micrografx Designer is dead.