I have been using various incarnations of Corel Draw since version 3 and had very limited exposure to any other vector based products. On the raster side of the equation, most of my experience is with Adobe PhotoShop. Having said that, I will attempt anew to give a fair evaluation of Corel Draw 9 suite of vector and raster products. Draw took full advantage of its head-start introducing advanced features, such as multiple page layouts, enveloping, blending and graduated transparency, to leave the competition trailing. Time has passed and now the race is a dead heat.
All applications share a similar look and feel.
In fact, it is not always a simple decision as to which package to use for a particular task, as there may be several ways of achieving the same objective. Although it is technically a drawing package, I have always viewed Corel Draw as a graphics integration tool since you can use it for page layout, for combining bitmap and vector images with text in a single document and numerous other non-drawing tasks. As the program has evolved, more and more non-drawing features have been added. The programs included offers a myriad of features, yet are not totally overwhelming. The focus of this review is on Corel Draw and Corel Photo Paint, although there is a ton of included graphics and other goodies within the package.