CorelDraw 8 focuses on productivity and Internet

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Can you improve the Two Little Circus Girls, painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir? With the latest upgrade of CorelDraw, you may be able to add some personal touches that will make this famous painting even more pleasant to look at.

Not only that, CorelDraw 8 also proves that you can always find ways to improve an already great software product.

Corel has announced the arrival of the most popular graphics program for the PC platform, and this product will be made available here some time next month. Courtesy of Corel Corp., Canada, I had the chance to try out Release Candidate 4.0 of the new release. Although the software development was not really completed, I was able to see a lot of improvements already.

However, don't expect eye-popping breakthroughs. Those of you who are familiar with this program would certainly realize how difficult it will be to make this program any better.

The program mix will not change much. The shipping version will contain more or less what I had in my test CD-ROM. For sure, it will consist of CorelDraw 8 for drawing vector objects, CorelPhoto-Paint 8 for editing bitmap and photos, and CorelDream 3D for creating 3-dimensional objects and modeling.

In addition, there are a number of other smaller utilities, including Corel Media Folder Indexer, Corel Color Profile Wizard 8 and Corel Duplexing Wizard. Typical installation of the program took up a little over 200 MB of my hard disk (the shipping version may require more).

Cleaner

CorelDraw was smart enough to detect that I had changed the color palette from 8-bit to 16-bit. I was told to close it and start again when I altered the Winfast S600 DX graphics card settings on my PC.

However, the first thing that CorelDraw 8 boasts is a cleaner and flatter interface.

As you should already know, the main problem with graphics programs such as CorelDraw and Photoshop is that, after working for a while, you will invariably end up having a totally cluttered screen.

Every tool has its own dialog box that allows you to adjust a variety of settings, and after you've called up several of them you'll have dozens of dialog boxes covering the graphics you're working on. New in CorelDraw 8 is the Docker window. We can now dock these dialog boxes into this window, which can be placed on the left or on the right of the workspace. To tell the truth, even a 20-inch monitor will feel too tight with both the Docker window and the workspace competing for real estate. You can turn the Docker off when you need a larger workspace.

It's also obvious that this new version is heavily tilted towards the Web. Not surprisingly, even CorelTUTOR now has a browser-like interface. Like in Version 7, you can publish to the Internet directly from inside CorelDraw 8. There is also an HTML Conflict Analyzer that will help you check the Internet objects in your drawing to ensure smooth posting on the Web.

Tools

Most of us have perhaps never used the scripting facility in CorelDraw 7. It is also available in this reiteration, as you can see in the accompanying picture. To create the neon effect of The Jakarta Post text, for example, I opened the Script Manager and went to the Script folder. I selected the text, and then selected the NeonWizard script. I clicked on the "go" button at the bottom of the dialog box, and the script started executing.

Other new tools include Interactive Drop Shadow, which in this prerelease version had not been completely functional yet. The Extrude tool will be more interactive, and the distortion tools will, too. You can mix colors by pressing the Ctrl key as you fill an already filled area with a different color. Each time, you add 10 percent of the new paint to the existing one. You can also use the knife to cut objects in curves. The new TextArt tool can extrude the text for you to create special effects automatically.

To allow you to work on any kind of project, the page size can be set as you wish. If you have the IntelliMouse from Microsoft, you'll be able to use it optimally, too. With its center wheel, you can alter the zoom level or pan around the entire image. If you don't want to rely on the mouse too much, you'll be happy to find that CorelDraw 8 now provides more accelerators keys.

Guidelines are now treated as object, so you can move them, skew them and rotated. When you have a large number of objects on the page, you can lock them to avoid altering them inadvertently.

The integration between bitmap and vector images is also improved. When working in CorelDraw, for instance, you can set the level of representation of a bitmap file on the page. All you need is to press on the Tab key to change from outline to XOR to full representation of the imported bitmap image. This will allow you to blend it more precisely with the surrounding vector images.

Final word

I installed the program on my Pentium 90 MHz machine, and I had no complaint about speed. If you have a faster machine, a Pentium II 300 MHz, for instance, you'll undoubtedly enjoy working with it very much. The program has been stable enough; I have not experienced any crash although the one I've been playing around is just a prerelease version.

The package will bring you over 100 new features and useful utilities. Many of them are still not available in my test version. Top of the list of welcomed features is perhaps its customizability. You can even set your own levels of zoom.

CorelDraw was first launched in 1989, and since then, it has been the de facto monopoly of the PC-based graphics world. Like in the past, you should not skip any upgrade of this software. With each annual upgrade CorelDraw has always become easier to use, and more interesting and useful tools have been added to unleash your creativity. So, look forward to designing your Christmas and Happy Hari Raya cards using CorelDraw 8.