Graphics Suite X4

Watch out Adobe! With its 14th version of CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4, the Ottawa, Canada-based company has once again thrown down a gauntlet in the page layout, graphics creation and manipulation application market. CorelDraw has been a main adversary for Adobe's design/layout applications for many years, going head to head with Illustrator, Photoshop (the application, if not the verb) and PageMaker/InDesign. It's a powerful and sophisticated suite that has grown into a real tour de force, offering increasingly easy interfaces and more thoughtful features with each version. Corel says the new suite offers more than 50 upgrades or significant enhancements over version X3 (which in a less silly world would perhaps have been called version 13, since it followed 12). Together, the apps can create anything from logos, web displays and multiple page brochures, to signage and digital displays. It features new text and page-layout enhancements, enhanced file format compatibility, and expanded clipart, photo and font content, just for starters. The Suite includes powerhouse applications CorelDraw and Photo-Paint, the former of which is for vector graphics and design/layout creation, with Photo-Paint the Photoshop competitor, Corel Capture, which lets you create (some might say "steal") graphics from your computer monitor, either the whole screen or an area you choose yourself, and PowerTRACE (formerly Trace), which lets to turn bitmaps back into editable vector graphics. Corel has optimized the suite for both of the people who still love using Windows Vista, and claims CorelDraw X4 is the only professional graphics suite Certified for the OS. For Vista users, this means the site integrates with Vista's handy desktop search capabilities directly from the Open and Import dialogue boxes, letting you search for files by author, subject, file type, date, keywords, etc. And you can add your own ratings, notes or keywords when saving files to help you organize projects better.