CorelDRAW’s 10th Anniversary R.A.V.E.

CreativePro Staff

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Though easy to miss amidst the hubbub over the debut of Adobe Photoshop 6.0, another major graphics application suite was also unveiled at Seybold San Francisco this week. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of its flagship product, Corel Corp. announced the imminent release of — appropriately — CorelDRAW 10. A longtime player in the Windows graphics market (and newcomer to the Mac as of version 8), the veteran graphics suite comprises both a vector drawing application (CorelDRAW) and image editing software (Corel PHOTO-PAINT). With version 10 Corel has introduced an animation module dubbed Corel R.A.V.E., which stands for Real Animated Vector Effects.

R.A.V.E. Review
The addition of a third application to the Corel suite is by no means a new development. Over the product’s decade-long history the company has regularly bundled and unbundled, introduced and retired a multitude of companion applications to CorelDRAW. From image browsers (CorelMosaic) to business apps (CorelChart and CorelPresentations) to mismatched utilities (Corel OCR-Trace) and others, the company has a history of throwing whatever it finds in the pantry into the Corel stew to sweeten the deal. Whether R.A.V.E. will be a significant and enduring inclusion or simply the flavor of the year remains to be seen. It is clear, however, that Corel recognizes that the Web is an important medium for users of the company’s products, and the addition of animation capabilities to the suite is an attempt to bring added value to the package.

The R.A.V.E. interface will be familiar to previous users of CorelDRAW, while not completely foreign to experienced animators. A Timeline Docker window allows intuitive dragging and dropping of events — object transitions, morphings, sounds, and the like — and setting of keyframes, and Object Tweening will generate a smooth animation in no time at all. Animations may be easily edited and previewed right within the R.A.V.E. application. Realizing that it is arriving late at the animation game, Corel is attempting to integrate the product with existing technologies rather than competing head to head: Completed animations can easily be exported to Macromedia Flash SWF format, complete with the necessary HTML code to quickly embed them into an existing Web page.

Speed Matters
Despite the company’s boast that version 10 is the product’s "biggest upgrade ever," there aren’t a lot of new features to be found in either the Draw or PHOTO-PAINT modules. That’s not to say, however, that the upgrade is insignificant. Much attention has been paid to increasing the application’s speed and enhancing its ease of use.

In addition to rewriting the PHOTO-PAINT code (DRAW code will be similarly improved later) as a set of streamlined interchangeable modules — in what Corel is calling "componentization" — programmers have managed to eliminate many dialog boxes in favor of realtime interaction. Gone are "Apply" buttons that make you wait to see the results of your actions — and then undo and start over if they’re not quite right. Other timesavers include a page-layout-style Page Sort view in Draw that lets you drag and drop objects among pages, as well as proxy images in PHOTO-PAINT that let you keep working on an image while time-consuming effects are applied in the background. A live Zoom tool in PHOTO-PAINT also gives you a smooth, interactive (rather than stepped) view of your image at just the size you want. A similar Pan tool works just as smoothly, making it easy to find just the right position for viewing image details.

Text handling has long been a CorelDRAW strong point. As always, text remains interactively editable, regardless of the effects you may have applied to it. Version 10 adds improved rendering of bitmapped text within PHOTO-PAINT as well as text-on-a-path features long present in the Draw module. Other improvements include a beefed-up PDF-export function in Draw that supports many more options than before (including preflighting and PDF/X-1-compliant output) and more-streamlined color management functions. Draw 10 now supports in-RIP separation and trapping to Postscript 3 output devices. Suite-wide enhancements include a Web Image Optimizer function, the ability to create rollover button effects, and Web page layout previews right within the application.

Corel expects to make the Windows version of CorelDRAW 10 Graphics Suite available in November for $569 ($249 for an upgrade), but will not ship the Mac version until Apple’s OS X begins shipping next year. With version 10 Corel has discontinued the sale of Corel PHOTO-PAINT as a standalone application.

Read more by Marty Beaudet.