Description:
CorelDRAW is a leading professional vector graphics application. Now in version 11, it continues to be full of innovative new tools and facilities, though learning how to use them all takes time and patience. Several of the improvements in the new version are designed to ease the drawing process by introducing tools to overcome specific drawing problems. For example, there are now new "three-point" tools for drawing rectangles, ellipses, and curves. With each you click to fix the first point, stretch out to define an axis or baseline, and click again to complete the object. This is a very useful alternative to the conventional way of drawing these figures, though the original tools are still there, too. Other new tools include Polyline and Pen. Polyline enables you to create lines and objects segment by segment, where each segment can be straight or curved. Pen is similar to the pen tool in Adobe Photoshop, offering a quick and easy way to create Bezier curves. Other handy new features include the ability to snap one object to another and to simplify shapes and extract the outline of one from another when they overlap. The Align and Distribute dialog is now "modeless," making it easier to work with when lining up objects. CorelDRAW 11 introduces Symbols to its repertoire, too. These are not the same as the symbol fonts that the program has offered for many years, but rather a way of saving and reusing drawn elements more efficiently than copying and pasting them. The advantage of symbols is that you can reuse "instances" of them, while only one description is stored in the drawing file. This saves considerable file space, which is particularly important when drawing Web graphics. Quite a few of the improvements in CorelDRAW 11 help when designing for the Internet. There's much improved support for industry-standard file types, such as SVG and compressed SVG and the ability to include symbols in PDF files, again a space saver. You can also preserve layers in your drawing when exporting to Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint and choose to import only specific pages from a PDF. If you're willing to put in the time and effort required to make the most of this program, CorelDRAW 11.0 will reward you with a sophisticated, complex, and extremely useful design application. --Simon Williams
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