As the centerpiece of Corel's Graphics Suite X4, CorelDraw X4 ships with significant new features that, while not flashy, are practical, and substantial enough for professionals to find the upgrade worthwhile. Even the interface has been redesigned to present a clean, intuitive workspace.
CorelDraw is the well-established "other" vector drawing program,
covering the same ground as Adobe Illustrator does. You can use it to
create illustrations for signs, logos, and technical and industrial
designs, and for specialized printing like engraving. Draw also works
for designing multipage publications. The growing ranks of people who
double as the designated designer in multitasking work environments will
appreciate the extensive set of easy-to-modify templates and the
intuitive help screens. Draw X4 ships with a substantial library of
royalty-free artwork, including 1000 high-resolution photos suitable for
commercial projects. And Draw X4 meshes smoothly with Windows Vista
Instant Search to sort quickly through images on your computer or
network from within Draw's Open Drawing dialog box.
More Improvements
Among the more substantial enhancements is a connection to
the WhatTheFont Web site: Within the app, you can paste in bitmap
captures of type to identify fonts-helpful, for example, for a designer
who is asked to duplicate a print brochure's unidentified fonts. Also,
you can now preview type flow around images instantly. Publishers who
generate data-driven output can use the print/merge features to generate
customized publications--so a product press kit, say, could have
customized fields that generate a personalized kit for each reviewer.
Draw has always had an advantage over products in Adobe's design suite
in that it is both a full-fledged vector drawing program (like
Illustrator) and a solid desktop publishing package (like InDesign).
Desktop publishing features in X4 now let you create and edit
independent layers on each page of multipage documents, as well as
implement master layers throughout a publication for repeating elements
(such as page numbers or headers). Illustrators who convert bitmap files
to Draw's vector format will spot changes in the bitmap trace feature
that allow, for example, combining of colors to simplify trace results.
Users who found the trace feature in CorelDraw X3 unpredictable will
notice improvements here.
The other significant application in Corel's Graphics Suite X4 is
Photo-Paint. Almost abandoned in version X3 of the suite, this
bitmap-editing application has some new features, including support for
the RAW camera format and interactive histograms for previewing image
adjustments. But while CorelDraw is a professional alternative to Adobe
Illustrator, Photo-Paint is not a professional photo editing app.
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