CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4
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System Requirements: Windows XP SP2/Vista, Pentium III or AthlonXP 800 MHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 430 MB free hard disk space.
Price: Rs 16,400 (Rs 8,900 upgrade)
Contact: Sathish Venugopal
Email: sathish.venugopal@corel.com
Website: www.corel.com
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Refreshed Designs
Indian graphics designers, desktop publishers, illustrators and students alike will all be familiar with the name Corel. CorelDRAW, the company’s flagship product, is often one of the first advanced software packages any aspiring designer picks up. It’s a highly flexible and powerful program, but has lost some of its shine in recent years due to from a general perception that it isn’t as powerful as Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator and CorelDRAW are highly mature, sophisticated products, and so both are bound to have their groups of loyal fans. We’re here to take a look at the entire package of programs contained in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4.
X4 incorporates a number of enhancements in terms of both features and usability. One of the first things you’ll notice is the slightly refreshed interface. All the buttons and toolbars have been given a makeover to fit in with Windows Vista, with subtle colors and gradient effects everywhere. Flyout menus on the toolbox now have text next to the icons by default, though this might not sit well with longtime users. There’s a new book-shaped welcome screen, with tabs that flip over to reveal little tips such as new features, tutorials, and sample images from the online CorelDRAW.com community. A ‘What’s new’ entry on the Help menu lets you choose which version you’re upgrading from, and then activate a yellow highlight around every button, tool, and menu item that’s new or improved since that version.
Cool Tools
The ‘File | New from Template…’ command brings up a gallery of templates sorted by categories such as Brochures, Flyers, and Advertisements. You can preview the templates at different zoom levels and check out their properties (such as physical dimensions and the number of pages and folds). But the most interesting part is the Designer Notes pane, which lets template designers share their thoughts about visual identity and style, along with suggestions for colors, fonts, the overall message trying to be conveyed, and recommended usage situations.
While on the topic of opening and creating new documents, CorelDRAW X4 can now import a bunch of new file formats, including documents saved by Office 2007 applications, Adobe CS3 applications, Painter X and AutoCAD. You’ll also notice the ‘Open…’ dialog box integrates with Vista’s integrated instant search, and uses large, high-quality image thumbnails. A redesigned Preview pane allows you to scroll through multi-page documents in the dialog box itself. However, these improvements are only available on Windows Vista. XP users won’t notice the slightest difference.
One fantastic addition is the ability to create different sets and groups of layers on each page of your image. This is a great way to reduce clutter and avoid editing parts of your image that you don’t want to. If you need a layer to span each page, you can simply create it in the Master Page section of the Object Manager docker.
New also are live previews of formatting changes. Unfortunately, text tended to deselect itself while running through lists of fonts and sizes; an apparent bug we hope is rectified with an update soon.
One of the most substantially upgraded features is PowerTRACE, the bitmap-to-vector conversion engine. CorelDRAW can now trace bitmaps using outlines or center lines, control the colors your vector will include, and tweak output settings in much finer detail than before.
On the table
But the headlining new feature is undoubtedly the brand new Table tool. There’s an all-new button in the toolbox, although you might miss it since it looks very similar to the Graph Paper tool of previous versions. In fact, you use it in almost exactly the same way. Simply select the tool and then drag from corner to corner to create an evenly spaced grid. However you’ll notice a massive difference in the property bar: instead of just the number of rows and columns, you have many options. You can define a background color or use different colors and fill effects as well as define the border thickness and stroke color for each cell. You can merge and split cells for flexible layouts, and even restore previously merged cells. You can convert text to tables and vice versa using commas, tabs, paragraphs or user-defined characters as delimiters. Tables copied from a word processor are also reproduced.
Also, as opposed to the Graph Paper tool, each cell becomes an individual text box as soon as you create a table. All you have to do is click inside a cell and you have the full power and scope of the Text tool at your disposal. Fonts, sizes, colors, etc can all be set for individual cells. Last but not least, placed bitmap images can be dropped into cells by right-clicking and dragging. It’s a great way to make neat collages and posters.
A MS Word-style gallery of table templates or easy ways to format header rows and columns would have been brilliant additions. There’s sure to be a market for document templates with color-coordinated tables built in.
All about the Web
There are also two neat Web-enabled features new to CorelDRAW X4. The first is a truly unique idea—integration with www.myfonts.com to use their What The Font service. If you’ve scanned or traced a graphic containing text but can’t identify the fonts used, you can just upload a clipping and it will do the work for you. Integration means all you have to do is click ‘Text | What The Font…’ and then draw a marquee around the font sample, rather than export the image, crop it, and then upload it from a browser. Identification was fairly accurate, but the site’s database isn’t exhaustive.
The second Web feature is Corel’s own ConceptShare. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a Web service that lets you share your design concepts with invited friends, colleagues or clients, who can pan, zoom, leave text comments and also draw on top of the design to highlight a point. ConceptShare seems like a nice idea, and it should be interesting to see a community of helpful commentators develop around it.
The other components
CorelDRAW is undoubtedly the king of the Graphics Suite, but it includes a few more standalone applications. Corel Photo Paint, a basic bitmap editor, has been a longtime companion to DRAW. It’s nowhere near Photoshop in terms of power and features, but this version is a step in the right direction with all-new RAW image format support, non-destructive image adjustments, and a tool to fix images scanned at odd angles. You’ll mainly use this program to prepare images for tracing, or save them for use on the Web.
Corel Capture is another standalone application that can capture not only screenshots, but also animations, individual windows and menus, or user-defined areas of the screen. BitStream Font Navigator is a neat font cataloguing and previewing application. And rounding out the suite is the Service Bureau Profiler, a wizard-style application for packaging and preparing your designs for a printing press.
Overall, there’s much less of a dramatic improvement in X4 than there was in X3. Users of X3 are unlikely to find a reason to upgrade, unless they really need the Table tool. But if you are still using CorelDRAW version 12 or below, you should give X4 a serious thought.
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