CorelDraw X4 Review Introduction

Well the new version is called CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4. I guess for us old timers we could also call it CorelDraw Graphics Suite 14. The last time I checked 14 was not bad luck like 13. But I guess calling the previous version X3 means that the next version should be version X4.

What is in the Box?

Included with the new version is the following

Applications

CorelDraw X4: CorelDraw the flagship program of the suite is a vector / raster illustration and page layout application. It is designed for design professionals as well as the occasional graphics user. For most of use CorelDraw is the only program that we use to create graphics, run our laser or run our sublimation printer.

• Corel Photo-Paint X4: The so called silent sibling of CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint is a very powerful image editing program. This program, although not as full featured as Photo Shop, it is still a very powerful program for editing images or creating graphics and special effects.
• Corel PowerTrace X4: Corel redesigned its Trace program when it introduced X3 to the market. It took a relatively poor program and made it very powerful. Corel PowerTrace is a powerful program than converts’ raster images into vector images.
• Corel Capture X4: Corel capture is CorelDraw’s screen capture program for collecting pictures of your existing screen and saving it to a file.

Supporting Applications

• Barcode Wizard: The barcode allows users to create barcodes very fast. There are a wide range of industry standard formats that are available.
• Service Bureau Profiler: The service bureau profiler helps users prepare their work for professional output.
• Duplexing  Wizard: The Duplexing wizard helps users who want to optimize their work for printing 2 sided documents.
• REALVIZ  Stitcher Express 2.5: This program aids in helping to automatically assemble a group of photos into a panorama up to 360 degree.
• Bitstream Font Navigator: One of my favourite programs. This program will keep a record of all fonts on your computer. You can use this program to load and unload fonts as quick as you can. No need to try and fumble around with the font install in Windows.

Media Content

• There are collection of more than 10,000 high-quality clipart and digital images. There are now 4,000 new images all of which have been selected to meet the needs of even the highest graphic user.
• 1000 new professional high-resolution digital photos
• 1000 OpenType fonts, including 75 Windows Glyph fonts and 10 single line engraving fonts
• 80 professionally designed templates

Documentation

• User Guide
• CorelDraw Handbook – Insight from the Experts
• Digital content guide
• Quick-reference card
• Help Files

Training

• 2 hours of training videos on DVD

Minimum System Requirements

• Windows XP (with Service Pack 2 or later) or Windows Vista (32 or 64 bit)
• 512 MB of Ram 275 MB of hard disk space
• Pentium 3, 800 MHz
• 1024 by 768 or better monitor resolution
• DVD Drive
• Mouse or Tablet

New and Enhanced Features in the CorelDraw X4 Suite

New Modernized user Interface: One of the things that has been lacking in previous editions of CorelDraw is a very drab interface. What I mean here is that the look of the program has seemed rather old.  Corel has added new icons, menus and controls that give the program a new and more intuitive working environment. Figure 1 shows the look of a new document in CorelDraw.

Figure 1

Windows Color System Support

CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 now supports the new Windows Color System which allows users to match color closer when it comes to Corel and other Windows applications in Vista.

Adobe® Color Management Color Module

CorelDraw Graphics Suite now supports the Adobe Color Management Module (CMM) which now like the Windows system supports consistent color transformation by using industry-standard International Color Consortium (ICC) color profiles. This now allows the user to match closer the colors between Corel and other Adobe applications.

Customizable Workspace

Corel has always allowed you to customize your workspace. Not only can you customize your workspace but if you are use to use to using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Office you can customize your workspace so that it matches these programs. CorelDraw Graphic Suite X4 now has updated user spaces that follow the newer versions of the above programs.

Microsoft Visual Basic
Corel now supports the new Microsoft Visual Basic 6.4. The visual basic addition allows you to automate a lot of your repetitive tasks.

Welcome Screen

The new welcome screen that comes up when you open up one of the Corel applications has now been expanded to be a lot more valuable and helpful to users. From the new welcome screen – figure 2, you have access to new content, tips and tricks, product registration, and the latest product updates.

Figure 2

Figure 3 shows that the new welcome screen also now provides a larger preview of an existing job that is in your “open recent” dialogue box.

Figure 3

Vista Integration

CorelDraw graphics suite X4 now takes advantage of the latest innovations that are available to the Windows Vista operating system. You can now search for files by author, subject, file type, date, keywords or other file properties from within the operating system dialogue box (such as the open, save or import dialogue box). You can now easily add keywords or other notes to saving files. This is something that I have wanted for a long time.

File Format Support

CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 has upgraded its support for new versions of Adobe CS3 products – PhotoShop and Illustrator. The suite now supports Acrobat 8. As far as AutoCAD goes there should be seamless compatibility with DXF and DWG formats relating to versions R2.5 to 2007.

Thumbnail Preview

CorelDraw now provides quality thumbnail previews which make it easier to find and organize CorelDraw and PhotoPaint files. Figure 4 shows that within the explorer dialogue box you can now view a good thumbnail view of the saved file.

Figure 4

Meta Search

Figure 5 shows screen shot of the new. As I mentioned earlier CorelDraw now allows us to embed “text strings” so that when we are searching for files we can search by the words that are in these strings. As figure 5 shows I have placed in some text strings that are highlighted by the red box.

Figure 5

CorelDraw Upgrades

Now that we have reviewed some of the main upgrades within the suite let us look at what has been added to CorelDraw.

Interactive Tables

When it comes to text layout the use of tables is always an important technique that is at the disposal of those that use a word processor program such as Word or Word Perfect. However when it came to CorelDraw there was no way to lay text out within a table. Tables are nice because it makes formatting text such as justification in columns a lot easier. In X4 Corel has made it easy to create a table. Corel has also allowed us to convert delimited text into a table.

Engraving Fonts

That is right. CorelDraw has now added 12 (at the time of this article that was the count) engraving fonts. This will make it easier now when you are creating logos for your rotary machine. You can now add text in CorelDraw as opposed to creating the logo importing it into your engraving program and then adding the text to the logo. If you want to output directly to your engraver from CorelDraw you now have the ability to do this.

Independent Page Layers

In X4 users can now control and edit layers independently for each page in the document. This is so nice. No longer do we have to deal with lots of “extra” guidelines that are cluttering up our workspace. You can create page guidelines now as well as master guidelines. You can take a page and duplicate it along with the objects within that page. Figure 6 gives you a shot of the new Object Manager.

Figure 6

Live Text Formatting

One of the nicer features in Word 2007 is the ability to see your text change in real time as you change a font or its size. CorelDraw has added the same functionality to X4. If you have some typed text on the screen and move through the text box your on the screen view will reflect the font you have moved over with your mouse. Figure 7 shows the text “Font Test” has changed to Arial Rounded MT Bold to reflect what I have moved over in the font pull down.

Figure 7

New Font Identification

CorelDraw X4 now incorporates “WhatTheFont” within the program. “WhatTheFont” is an online service from MyFonts.com that helps in identifying a font that is used in existing designs or artwork received from clients.

Enhanced Print Merge

One of the more important features that I stress users that they need to understand and use is the print merge function. Corel understands that the print merge is an import tool to its user so it has updated this tool to make it easier for users to use. Figure 8 shows the new interface that you will see. You can now add fields based on whether they are text or numeric.

Figure 8

Center Line Trace

The new centerline trace feature found in the PowerTrace module allows you to take an image such as line drawings or signatures and create a single line trace as opposed to the more traditional outline trace. Corel has improved the smoothing and corner control to help optimize traced results.

To control which colors get traced you can now edit merge or delete colors on the color palette. Figure 9 shows some text converted to center line.

Figure 9

Corel PhotoPaint

New Camera Raw File Support

Corel PhotoPaint now supports the raw camera file format for over 300 different types of cameras. This support lets users import raw camera files directly from their cameras. With interactive controls the new filter provides file properties, camera settings, the ability to adjust image color and tone, and to also improve image quality.

Straighten Your Image

In Corel PhotoPaint users can now easily straighten an image that has a rotation to it. The tool comes with vertical and horizontal guidelines and an integrated histogram that provide real time results to fix those cockeyed photos. No longer will you have to “eyeball” those rotated scanned images or photos.

Histogram Feed Back

The new histogram feedback provides more features and effects that now provide histogram feed back in real time. This allows the ability to edit images more efficiently by previewing changes and comparing results as they adjust.

Enhanced Tonal Curve

One of the more powerful tools in color correction is the Tonal Curve tool. In PhotoPaint X4 this tool has been enhanced to help users adjust their images so that they can have more precision in correcting those images. The tool comes with an integrated histogram and now provides real time feed back to the user of the changes that they are looking at implementing.

There is a new eyedropper tool that allows the user to pick specific locations on the tone curve of their image.

Overall

Well that is a quick overview of the new CorelDraw Graphic Suite X4. As is usual Corel has made a substantial effort in providing a number of new features. Some of the more notable features such as the enhanced meta search, center line trace, engraving fonts and print merge update are features that can be used in our industry. Some others are features that are designed are for other industries.

If you are interested in reviewing what is new in X4 or for that matter any versions you can go to the help menu and select  “Highlight What’s New” as per figure 10. This will highlight all the new features that are available.

Figure 10

The big question for me and something that I am going to be asked more times than I will be able to count is “Should I upgrade to X4”. As I said when I did my X3 review if you are on any version such as 12, 11 or 9 than you should upgrade. Just make sure that if you are going to upgrade that you are running XP or Vista.

The Good

When it comes to upgrading I tend to always want the latest version. The one big reason I want to keep current with a program such as CorelDraw is because I get so many different requests from so many people that need files converted or worked on. For this reason I need to make sure that I have the latest version of filters for AutoCAD, Adobe reader and Illustrator. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to import a file and have it not work due to the incompatibility of your import filters witht the file you are trying to bring in.

Are there other notable features? I like the new redesigned print merge function that has been enhanced. Also, for years I have wanted to be able to assign meta tag information to files so that I could search those files when I need them. For example, if you do a lot of jobs for a company you can include this information in the file so that when you search for the company’s name those files come up. The new font identification feature will be very helpful as long as it works. I have not had a lot of time to check it out but I will in a future article. One of the other excellent upgrades is the ability of the object manager to support different guidelines on each page. I like to do multiple page files and it has always been a real hassle when I would use guidelines as the guidelines from other pages would be visible on the page I was working.

The new table feature will help out when it comes to positioning groups of text. I have wanted this feature for a while. Also the center line trace feature is nice and has potential. The addition of engraving fonts – as long as they are good – will help people creating logos for rotary engravers. It will also be very helpful when you are doing very small letters with the engraver (sometimes it is better to engrave in vectors than raster.

The Bad

Okay as usual with any upgrade there are items that have been missed. Again Corel has missed the boat when it comes to the Holy Grail for the marking industry and that is the ability to auto condense text. I have asked for this feature but to not avail. Another feature is to have a proper multiple plate feature that so many of us take for granted when we are using our rotary software. The other problem with Corel has been the lack of “cleanliness” of the fonts in Corel. One character at .5 inches is different than another font that is at .5 inches. This is very frustrating because there are so many fonts. I could go on but we need not get to negative.

Hopefully this review has given you some basic information into what you can count on when evaluating whether you want to upgrade to X4. I will upgrade when the new version comes because I always do. Remember that if you want you can load the new version and still have your old version on the same computer. If you are afraid that you may not be able to do something in the new version like you can in the old version than this is a safe way of having the new version available. If you need to go back to your old version you can. It is my wish that everyone upgrades so that we are all on the same page. It makes it a lot easier to support people.