The New CorelDRAW 7.0: An upgrade you must have

By Zatni Arbi

Jakarta (JP): What was it that always characterized each of CorelDRAW's reincarnation in the past? Three things: Bigger, bigger and bigger. The culmination seems to have been reached when Version 6.0 was released. That was when the software was shipped in four CD-ROMs.

But it seems that Corel has broken with this tradition. Instead of barraging us with tons of new features -- which most of us never get the chance to learn, let alone use, Corel has chosen to concentrate more on improving what's already there. The result is a much tamer CorelDRAW 7.0 suite that comes in only three CD-ROMs.

Right from the first glance it is obvious that the development team of this de facto leader in PC-based graphics software has kept well up with the general trends in software usability. Many of the improvements in CorelDRAW 7.0 have been adopted from major DTP and word processing programs that we have been familiar with for some time.

The software maker, Corel Corp. of Ottawa, Ontario, seems to be expanding rapidly at present. Its line of products has grown to encompass the computer-aided design world, too. Corel now offers CorelCAD, which it is positioning against the industry leader AutoCAD, as well as Corel Visual CADD, which it is targeting at professional drafters.

For the home and small-business owners, there is the US$69.00 Corel Print & Photo House package. Its upcoming product will be Corel Office Suite for Java. Based on Corel WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, CorelCHART, and a set of other applets, this will be the first set of productivity suites written for the Java platform.

Dr. Michael Cowpland, Corel's president and chief executive officer, seems to be daring enough to go out of his company's turf and enter the hardware industry as well. In an info-fax that I received from the company, Corel announced that it is planning for a video-enabled network computer. Furthermore, according to Byte, this company is also intending to enter the personal digital assistant (PDA) market. Let's just hope that Corel Corp. can prove to us that bigger can sometimes mean better.

32-bit version

Now back to our favorite CorelDRAW 7.0. First of all, Corel has finally dropped the exclamation mark that used to appear at the end of the name of their programs; it's now called CorelDRAW instead of CorelDRAW!.

Corel promises that the new 32-bit version has a better performance than its predecessor. The promise is delivered, as I notice that the program loading and file open operations are indeed quicker. Importing and redrawing, especially of objects with fountain fills, are also faster.

You can now choose any of four or five levels of display quality, so that you can work faster in the beginning stages and leave the detail work for the final stages when you may choose high-view quality but slower display. If you want to have the ultimate in precision drawing, you can zoom by as much as 400,000 percent.

CorelDRAW 7.0 is written for both Windows 95 and Windows NT. Certainly it is now also packed with tools to connect it with the Internet. Under the File menu item there is a command "Publish to Internet". Using Corel Barista, a Java-based publishing technology, you can create Web pages in CorelDRAW and publish it in the Java programming language.

Among all the new features introduced in CorelDRAW 7.0, the one I most heartily welcome is the Property Bar. Adopting the concept of tool palettes from QuarkXpress and PageMaker, this palette is both in CorelDRAW! and CorelPHOTO-PAINT 7.0, which make manipulating selected objects so much easier and interactive.

You can leave this property bar attached to the toolbar on top of the screen or you can drag it around and change it into a floating palette. In the accompanying illustration, you can see it along the bottom edge of the screen.

Just to give you an idea of how useful this Property Bar is, here's what it does when no object is selected. In the previous versions, if I wished to change the page orientation from the default portrait to landscape, I had to click on the Layout menu item, click on Page layout, and then click on the Landscape button on the dialog box that appears. It took three steps. But now, all I have to do is click the landscape orientation button on the Property Bar, and the page will immediately change from upright to sideways.

When we work with text, for instance, we can change the font we use from the font list box in the Property Bar. No longer do we have to go to the Text menu. Another great thing is that we can preview the fonts more easily, as the flyout will show us a sample of each font.

Like in Winword, CorelDRAW now spell-checks the text that we enter on the fly. If you type in a word that doesn't exist in its dictionary, CorelDRAW will put a red line under it. Click with the mouse right button on the word, and CorelDRAW will give us a list of similarly spelled words from which we can select the correct one to replace the misspelled word.

Using the AutoCorrect-like feature, we can also create custom- abbreviations, too. I found it so amazing how much CorelDRAW had imitated Winword. Are we going to hear about another lawsuit on the "look and feel" issue? I wonder.

Except for the printed documentation that now comes in three thick volumes, CorelDRAW 7.0 has been successfully streamlined. The interface is deceivingly clean, because actually it's more customizable than ever. Under the Tools menu there are the Options and Customize commands. You'll be overwhelmed by the array of options that you can choose to customize your work environment.

This program now boasts interactive cursors, extensive drag and drop (you can drag and drop color from the color swatches to change the fill or the outline color of an object), color styles, scripts to automate operations, find and replace wizards, an object manager, and a scrapbook.

Text that has already been placed on a path can be interactively edited. But the amazing thing is what you can now do with bitmap images in CorelDRAW, without having to leave the program. For instance, you can convert a vector object into a bitmap image and then adjust its transparency interactively.

Without having to move into CorelPHOTO-PAINT, you can apply many different effects to a bitmap image in CorelDRAW. The drop shadow of the text The Jakarta Post, for instance, was created by applying the Gaussian blur to a duplicate of the text that had been first converted into a bitmap object. Support for Adobe Photoshop-compatible plug-ins which can be applied to bitmaps is also provided.

I believe what all of us will appreciate very much in the latest upgrade will be the CorelTUTOR. You can go into sessions that will lead you step by step in using some of the most important tools in CorelDRAW. In fact, I got the lesson on how to create the correct drop shadow from this tutorial. There are also hints you can browse, so that you can learn tricks from the people who develop the program.

Conclusion

There are a slew of other features and tools, many of which are brand-new. I've been playing around with this program for more than one month now, and I still encounter new special effects that compel me to say "wow". The two new tools in the toolbox, the interactive transparency and interactive blend tools can really do magic.

It's also obvious that CorelDRAW also picks up several handy approaches from CorelXARA, a graphics program that has not received the recognition that it actually deserves. Certainly, whether you're a professional graphics artist or an occasional CorelDRAW user, you must grab this upgrade.

By the way, if you suffer from the notorious Mac-envy, take heart. CorelDRAW 6.0 is now available for the Mac platform as well.