TCS - Corel Draw 6.0 Review

Corel Draw 6.0 Review

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the January 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

I have used CorelDraw since version 3.0, and it just gets bigger and better each version. CDR 3 came on floppies or one CD; CDR 4 took 2 CDs, CDR 5 took 3 CDs, and guess what, CDR 6 takes four CD-ROMs packed with four graphics applications, a lot of utilities, and several thousand pieces of clip art, scanned photographs, fonts, and miscellaneous multimedia files, The full installation consumes 200 MB of disk space, runs only under Windows 95 or NT, and demands nothing less than a 486 PC. And if you want to run more than one application at a time, you'd better have at least 16 MB of RAM. These are hefty requirements, especially considering CorelDraw's prominence among casual artists and business users who still rely on less-powerful machines.

The changes in version 6.0 are most evident in the peripheral programs, which have undergone something of a shakeout. Corel Ventura, is no longer included, because Corel plans to sell it as an independent package. In its place are three animation and 3D drawing programs: Dream 3D and CorelDepth, based on Ray Dream's modestly priced Designer and AddDepth, and Motion 3D, which came from Specular International's LogoMotion. The old charting, animation, and presentation modules -- Chart, Move, and Show -- have been consolidated into a single presentation program called CorelPresents.

The major programs in the suite are the vector-based illustration program Draw and the pixel-based image editor Photo-Paint.

CDR 6 includes a new polygon tool that creates multisided shapes with radial symmetry. Unlike FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator, Draw maintains the symmetry of the polygon even after you reshape it. And you can add and delete anchor points ("nodes") while still maintaining a symetrical shape.

In Photo-Paint you can undo multiple consecutive operations by selecting them from a list, although they then become permanent; you can't restore them with the Undo command.

With Presents, Corel has combined products from third party sources into a functional and usable presentation package. All the essential ingredients are there, including an outliner, a slide sorter, and straightforward functions for creating speaker notes and handouts.

Dream 3D lets you construct and import 3D models, apply surface textures, add lights and cameras, and render the finished scene to a bitmap image file.

Corel DRAW 6 also includes the following new or improved utilities and value-added features:

  • CorelDEPTH: A New 3D logo creation utility.
  • Corel SCRIPT Editor: A New OLE scripting language used to create add-on utilities for CorelDRAW .
  • Corel SCRIPT Dialog Editor: A New utility used to create dialogs that can be used in conjunction with Corel SCRIPT.
  • CorelMEMO: A New OLE compliant utility which gives users the ability to attach notes to their drawings or documents without altering the original graphics or text.
  • Corel FONT MASTER: A New font management program for True Type and Adobe Type 1 fonts.
  • Corel MULTIMEDIA MANAGER: Used to manipulate and manage files in albums.
  • Corel OCR-TRACE: an enhanced optical character recognition/raster to vector conversion utility.
  • Corel CAPTURE: Used to capture all or custom areas of a screen.
  • Corel PRESENTS Runtime Player: Used for distributing presentations.
  • 25, 000+ clipart images and symbols
  • 1000+ TrueType and Type 1 fonts
  • 1000+ photos
  • 750+ 3D models
  • 50 CorelDRAW templates
  • 300+ full-colored bitmap textures
  • 125+ natural media brushes for Corel PHOTO-PAINT
  • 260+ video clips
  • 1500+ actors, props and sounds
  • 100+ floating objects
  • 80+ chart types
  • 300+ presentation backgrounds
  • 50 presentation templates

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    Tulsa Computer Society 02/07/97
    Don Singleton, President
    tcs@galstar.com