From: rick@sundance.SJSU.EDU (Richard Warner)
Subject: Re: Corel Draw 3.0 CD-ROM Edition (Reviewed by Tony Thomas)
Organization: San Jose State University - Math/CS Dept.
Date: 10 Sep 92 22:59:03 GMT

ken@minster.york.ac.uk writes:

>Tony Thomas (aa699@cleveland.Freenet.Edu) wrote:

>Fine. All programs do have bugs. Corel Draw is big. BUT... they should not
>be shipping a package that an ordinary non-expert user like me is likely to
>break. The import filters break very often, dumping the program. I had the
>most horrible bug where Corel Draw wouldn't write to disk. Utterly refused.
>An no, it was nothing to do with disk space. It was the save routine. I had
>to export the file as WMF and re-import it after killing CorelDraw. Lucky I
>thought of that. The export to TrueType fonts doesn't work more than 50% of
>the time.

Have you reported these to Corel?  I am a regular participant in the 
CompuServe COREL forum and your experience runs counter to what has been
reported there.  Given that your problems seem to be > 1 standard deviation
away from normal, maybe there is something unusual about your machine.  One
of the problems with Windows - and I will say it for the umpteenth time - is
that it does not properly protect one app from another app or device driver
that is ill-behaved.  I had a number of problems with two programs (and 
only two) on my PC.  Both were directly attributable to problems in the
video driver.

>Add to this the atrocious user interface "features" (like why can't you set
>the attributes of a whole load of text items together, instead of selecting
>them individually, or why can't you set the default text font/size to be
>persistent between invocations, or why trying to centre a piece of text
>takes over a second on a fast 486, or why my text in Corel pictures always
>comes out boldened compared to text generated from Word, or ....) and it's 

These are your preferences.  Corel made a decision NOT to do these.  Text
handling has vastly improved over Ver. 2.0 - and some users asked for
the types of changes you are asking for.  These are not 'bugs' - they
are you, simply put, what you prefer.  As for the speed of centering, 
one factor that plays into that is video speed.  Processor speed is of
secondary or tertiary importance in most drawing programs, including
Corel.

>clear that CorelDraw 3.0 was rushed onto the market place without adequate 
>testing. Which is why they are now shipping patches to it. I understand the 
>market pressures on them to do this, but I really would appreciate a little 
>more care. Perhaps I've been pampered by Microsoft products.. :-)

Whoa.  MS Word 5.0 has to be a serious contender for the buggiest piece
of software ever released by a major software company (and that after
9 months of delays in shipping, the last 3 of which Word was off the
market because Bill decided not to sell version 4.0 any more).  W4W
1.0 and 2.0 are also quite buggy (why did MS rush out 2.0a so fast? There
aren't any new features).   Do you want to talk DOS 3.0?  Major 
infestation!  Windows 3.0?  OS/2 1.0 (MS wrote almost all of it)? 

>One final disclaimer: I _like_ CorelDraw. Fix the niggling user interface
>problems, and fix the bugs, and you have the most impressive and useful
>drawing program on the market. The shipping of a CD was an excellent move,
>and shipping the video tape was inspired. I'll have to see if the latest
>patch fixes the problems. 

>Are the patches available by FTP? I can see I'll have to wait years for an
>official patch disk to be mailed to me.

First, they are not patches.  It is a whole new version - 3.0b, including
some additional features to go with the bug fixes.   Second, very few 
commerical houses use Internet distribution for either one of two 
reasons:  how do you control who gets your code, and how many of your
customers will you reach (very few, relatively).

>--
>Ken Tindell             Internet      : ken@minster.york.ac.uk
>Computer Science Dept., Local FTP site: minster.york.ac.uk
>York University,        Tel.          : +44-904-433244         
>YO1 5DD, UK             Fax.          : +44-904-432708
>--
>"The Gulf War won't be like a Rambo film; it will be long, bloody and terrible"
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