Informal poll

[smorg]

I find myself constantly going back to CD8 to flesh out my ideas. Sometimes I'll export them into programs that can do 3D (like Real-DRAW Pro), but them bring them back into CD8 to finish them up for format exporting, printing, color seps, etc. In job as a typesetter, it has all the tools I need to get the job done, especially manual kerning. I love the WYSIWYG font display, making choices easy. I think Font Navigator is marvellous, and in spite of some tweaking you have to do, I actually prefer Corel Trace to Adobe Streamline...Streamline is just too "chunky" for my taste in its outline conversions.

Now, another question. Would it be worthwhile for me to upgrade to CD9?

[Bob C.]

Hi smorg,

I’m semi-retired and use Corel for small jobs, and swaps. Made and maintain a web page, a business card and flyers for a landscape company for services rendered etc.

I started with CD4 - I just had to have the Animation portion WITH sound found in Corel Move! I purchased it for about $99 - CD5 was out and CD6 was about ready to be released so I got a deal.

Photoshop for the PC was not available at the time and when I compared the features of CD to Photoshop vs. price ....well no contest really and that is still the case IMHO. This mystique about Photoshop eludes me!

I now use CD7 and was going to upgrade to CD9 but heard it was very slow and I only had a Pentium 200 MMX. I now have an AMD 750 with 128 MB of RAM (soon to be 256MB - just ordered the other 128MB today for $26.63!!!)

I am considering CD10 - heard it was faster now too but no picture manual for the clipart etc. Is that true, does anyone here know??

I bought XaraX in Jan. and have been spending most of my time using that app. now but it can’t edit bitmaps the way PhotoPaint can, remarkable program though. It has helped me get over the “hump� of using a vector drawing tool. Never could get used to CD Draw (vector portion)!

But I’m hopeful now because of Xara!!

[smorg]

Hi, Bob! I think your best bet to get an answer about upgrading would be to try the forums at www.unleash.com; they've done several reviews of both CD9 and CD10 (which now has a SP1 out). Even though I've read both, I still can't decide! You might have better luck deciding than I have.

As for the CD10 documentation and help files, I've heard it's the worst of any version, but ask at Unleash.

Good luck!

[Not Ziggy]

We use Draw 10 here at this medium-sized print shop and it's frightening to think what would happen if we had to switch to using the entire bewildering stable of Adobe products instead. The reduction in productivity would probably put us out of business in a few months.

I've been using Draw since Version 3 and I've long maintained two things about it: First, it's a better page layout program than PageMaker or Quark, and second, whether a program is better is not really the point to most people.

For most people, the point(s) are, first, that they've already gotten quite proficient at something else (which is a perfectly good reason) and/or that they're prone to follow the herd (which is a perfectly dumb reason).

All my life I've chosen to associate with less popular options, and I've rarely regretted it. The thing about CorelDraw that seems to rescue it from the fate of other products that were superior but died in obscurity (Ami Pro, the Tucker automobile, BetaMax, Vincent Van Gogh) is that Corel is Canadian. There is some strange, almost child-like honesty about Canadians that prevents them from pricing Draw for more than it costs them to make it. Never mind that to match the functionality of Draw/Photopaint in Adobe products would take $2000 or more; that, to a Canadian, is not the point.

[smorg]

Sorry, I just upgraded my 'puter to a cable modem and I haven't visited here in a while.

I'm glad to hear others like the "third party" software, too, and that another typesetter loves CD! Since I got my first computer and discovered cover discs, I've loved those non-industry standards (which is how PSP and WinZip started). I've found the smaller programs can do exactly what you want, faster, with less drain on your resources, than those memory/disk hogs like ******** [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] Case in point, I absolutely love WordPerfect, but if I were starting from scratch and needed a word processor, I would go with the $50 WordExpress, which does everything you need without the bloat.

People tend rag on CD after using it for years, but it's the best comp program I've used (if I need "kewl" graphics like sharp bevels, I'll port in into Real-DRAW, which imports .wmf, and then pick it up again in CD to export as a CMYK .tif). It's just my favorite program, quirks and all.

BTW, see the thread in the Xara conference on family photos (started by joroho) for a pix of my cat, Ziggy...it's one of my fav names [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[This message was edited by smorg on July 12, 2001 at 09:31.]