Sneak Preview: CorelDraw 9 for Linux

By: Michael Hall
Tuesday, June 20, 2000 09:48:44 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/1981/1/

An Overview of CorelDraw 9 Beta 2

There are some things that don't make themselves clear enough when you're a Reviewer With a Short Attention Span until they arrive in a FedEx envelope with an invitation to look. It doesn't help that everyone who's ever heard the word "Linux" has an opinion on what it will take to "elevate" Linux to the corporate desktop, causing reviewers to run around flapping our arms at spreadsheets, databases, and support contracts.

Fortunately, a few minutes with CorelDraw 9 beta release 2 can lend some clarity in an otherwise noisy and crowded situation and cause even the most obtuse reviewer to stop for a moment, gather his wits, and realize that Corel has just tossed a couple of platinum chips in the pot.

Before going any further, I'll make a few disclaimers:

I love the GIMP. I've always loved the GIMP. I probably won't be saying anything in this preview that will cause the GIMP's core audience to throw down their mouses and reach for their credit cards. As a community, we have every right to be proud of an application even Adobe's support people are rumored to recommend to Linux users inquiring about a PhotoShop port.

On the other hand, there's an audience of folk migrating into our community who have needs even the GIMP isn't quite up to filling: though work is being done on incorporating Macromedia Flash support, for instance, and there are ways around pre-press and color calibration issues, these are still things incompletely addressed by the once and future champion of free software graphics tools. There's also a community within our community attracted to tools with a similarity to the operating system they still think of as "home": Windows 9x. CorelDraw 9 looks like it may step in to satisfy that userbase, and provide Linux with another powerful argument in the battle for home and office desktops.

Getting CorelDraw 9
The CorelDraw 9 Graphics Suite is composed of Photo-Paint, a bitmap image editor providing photo-editing and painting capabilities; and CorelDRAW, a vector graphics tool for creating illustrations.

The suite is currently in beta release. Later this month, Corel will be releasing Photo-Paint as a free download. In August, the entire suite (Phot-Paint and CorelDraw combined) will be released with a price comparable to the Windows version.

The suite is shipped in RPM and Debian's .deb format for installation, and Corel includes a couple of additional support RPM's specifically for Red Hat.

The stated requirements for the system are light: a Pentium 200 with 64 MB RAM and 256 MB of hard drive storage.

General Overview
The immediate eye-catcher in terms of the feature set of the suite is CorelDraw's support for Macromedia Flash as a file-export option. We'll take a look at that a little further in the article. Though there are tools like Olivier Debon's Swift Generator, the ability to author content with a full-featured vector graphics tool is a definite plus.

The second noteworthy feature in the package is Corel's inclusion of ICC color management profiles and Pantone color palettes. These features are important to shops looking to make the jump to the Linux desktop for prepress work. A standing complaint in terms of using Linux for professional, production quality print graphic work has been the lack of support for industry standard color management--a complaint that has just been answered.

As with Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000, the Bitstream FontTastic font manager is included. CorelTUTOR is present to aid users new to the software.

Photo-Paint: Photo Editor and Paint Program

Photo-Paint provides the image manipulation/creation side of the suite. It provides features and functions similar to programs such as the GIMP, PhotoShop, or JASC's PaintShop Pro. This program is the side of the suite home users and hobbyists are likely to be the most interested in.

Like the GIMP and PhotoShop, Photo-Paint allows users to create multi-layered images and apply a number of graphical filters (which Corel refers to as "effects"). Corel includes about 40 separate effects. Most of them will be fairly familiar to those who've used other photo-editing packages. They run the gamut from "art effects" (making the image look like an oil painting, charcoal drawing, or watercolor) to textural effects that introduce three-dimensional "surfaces" to make the image look like it was painted on rough paper, fabric, or brick. Each of the effects is previewable, and the undo feature allows the user to back out of undesired changes.

Photo-Paint has some additional features to aid in image manipulation and creation. One interesting tweak is the ability to simulate use of a pressure sensitive input device with the mouse by pressing the up and down arrow keys while drawing. Photo-paint also includes an "image sprayer" that allows for painting ordered sequences of small images.

Photo-Paint also includes the ability to create scripts of effects that can be run on batches of files. Creating scripts is simple enough: it involves turning on a recorder, operating on the image with whatever tools or effects you choose, and saving the resulting recording of your keystrokes and mouse motions. The outstanding online documentation includes an example script if you're interested in writing your own without benefit of the recorder.

In addition to the filters, which include a good variety of choices and plenty of customization options, there's the normal array of tools for image manipulation, including paintbrushes, a reasonably flexible text tool, convolvers, flippers, and mask tools. It's easy to manipulate the color elements of a given image, including creating CMYK separations.

Photo-Paint also features compatibility with a wide variety of file formats. Though the promotional material with the release claims compatibility even with the GIMP's xcf format (which preserves layer and color information), we were unable to import or export to this format successfully. It may be appropriate to keep in mind that we were looking at a beta release before judging this feature.

One element of file manipulation we appreciated was the ability to preview the effects of saving a file from one format to another. A comparison dialog appears, allowing the user to judge the effects of image compression, palette reduction, or other potentially artifact-inducing changes before committing to writing the file.

Everything in Photo-Paint is held together rather well by two things that have nothing directly to do with the image on the screen: the online documentation and CorelTUTOR.

The standard documentation provides a searchable index. It was surprisingly detailed and understandable. We were able to answer several key questions with little trouble using it. The CorelTUTOR is also extremely useful, teaching basic concepts to users in a step-by-step manner that's clearly explained. CorelTUTOR even includes a guide to creating KDE themes to go with Corel's Linux distribution with Photo-Paint.

Both of these elements aid Photo-Paint in being an excellent consumer offering, and another item to tick off on the list of reasons Linux may soon find its way on to more and more non-computer-hobbiest desktops.

Some Issues
Unfortunately, there are a few issues with Photo-Paint, too, having much less to do with the core software itself than with Corel's ongoing use of WINE, which is allowing the company to port applications to Linux more quickly. The problem is one of interface speed more than anything. Some rather exacting tweaks of one's window manager are required to eliminate some flicker and redraw issues, and many of the file dialogs, menus, and requesters are sluggish. Fortunately, the program seems to behave well, and the speed of the filters when being applied to an image is fine, but it's unacceptable to deal with dialog windows that never appear at the front of the screen because they've been inexplicably consumed by the main window.

Much of this sluggishness and strange behavior may be attributed to the fact the product is still in beta and not quite tweaked fully, so it's inappropriate to render any final judgements. On the other hand, we ardently hope someone at Corel is listening and working on ironing some of these problems out. They're frustrating annoyances in an otherwise featureful and solid product.

Concluding Words on Photo-Paint
Overall, Photo-Paint is a solid, feature-filled tool that brings a consumer-oriented, but professional quality product to the Linux desktop. We hope some of the WINE-related issues are worked out, or better addressed, but the program itself is promising. Corel continues to make good on their efforts to bring Linux to everybody.

Corel Draw: A Vector Graphics Tool with Punch

The other half of the CorelDraw suite is Corel Draw itself: a powerful and feature-packed vector graphics tool that brings Flash authoring to the Linux desktop, along with some other features design professionals will find some use for.

Vector graphics tools are critical to press-oriented publications. Unlike bitmap (or "raster") images, vector graphics are built for the precision print media tend to demand. Line art, extraneous design graphics, and body text for print copy all benefit from the scalability and accuracy vector graphics introduce to design work.

Corel Draw is a high quality entry in this area, bringing plenty to the table.

As with Photo-Paint, Corel Draw offers a solid collection of tools for creating and manipulating illustrations. Despite our own orientation to raster image tools, we had little trouble figuring out the basic elements of Corel Draw, and were actually able to apply some interesting special effects to our creations fairly quickly.

In some ways, as a matter of fact, our yen for working with bitmaps was answered by the fact that among the tools CorelDraw includes, there's one for converting graphical elements from vector to bitmap format. Once converted, an array of filters are available, much like with Photo-Paint, to introduce assorted distortions and enhancements to the element.

Corel Draw isn't about making pictures prettier, though, it's about producing ready-to-print material that includes a mix of illustrations and text. To that end, it includes some interoperability features that help it work with WordPerfect 9, such as preserving the formatting of text imported from WordPerfect right down to column layout. There is also a thesaurus and spell checker with the text tool, a boon to the copywriter who doesn't want to spend a creative session reaching for a book.

Because a lot of material is prepared for release both as paper copy and as web content, Corel's included a wizard that aids in the generation of CSS-oriented output. The option also exists to create PDF files for use with the popular Adobe Acrobat format.

In our opinion, the 800 pound gorilla of the suite, though, is the option to export work to Macromedia Flash (SWF) files. This is a one-way process, since Corel Draw can't import such files, but the ability to author Flash content is a powerful addition to the Linux productivity desktop, and one we suspect will lull quite a few businesses into considering Linux for their design bullpens.

Though time prohibited us from creating our very own Flash-animated masterpiece (or even, we'll admit, cool rollover effects), we were pleased to note that there are some authoritative articles on the Corel site for how to exploit this feature.

Concluding Notes on Corel Draw
As with Photo-Paint, we were impressed with the number of tools Corel Draw brings to bear to the task of creating illustrations. Corel has some experience in creating polished end-user applications, and it shows with this port.

Once again, we weren't without issues regarding the use of WINE and some of the pokiness this introduces to the overall experience. On the other hand, some speed issues were dealt with by the fact the product allows the user to change the level of detail viewed all the way from very simple wireframe representations to fully anti-aliased views, which sped things up in terms of moving elements around the page quite a bit.

The documentation was once again top notch, and the inclusion of links within the program to Corel's Web site, which features lots of articles, tutorials, and downloads made for a really pleasant learning experience.

Conclusions

Right or wrong, there's an argument to be made about where Linux is headed as a desktop OS and what it's going to take to get it there. Corel has clearly pledged itself to the task of making Linux at home on the corporate and personal desktop, and shows no signs of backing down from that committment.

The CorelDraw Suite is a powerful indicator of Corel's ability to bring feature-filled, powerful applications to Linux. Despite the issues we continue to have with the performance hit use of WINE appears to incur, we're consistently impressed with the sheer number of features and polish Corel brings.

We don't believe CorelDraw is going to be for everybody. There are plenty of Web designers who will be content to stand pat with the GIMP, for instance. On the other hand, a whole community of business and home users will be drawn to Corel's offerings because they're friendly, feature-packed, and end-user oriented. Corel's contribution to the Linux community continues to be something to watch.