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Sneak Preview of CorelDraw 9 for Linux
A reader writes "Michael Hall of LinuxPlanet wrote a pretty nifty review of CorelDraw 9 for Linux. He's a mondo GIMP fan, but he's still saying nice things about CorelDraw, kinda sorta."
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Rumors of Wine's slowness are greatly exaggerated. The latest version plays Half-Life and Counterstrike at high frame rates on my TNT2 card with the latest NVIDIA drivers :-)
We've heard a lot that Corel has been running WP2k under wine, rather than recompiling with libwine. Does anyone know why they wouldn't recompile with libwine? Sure, it might be more of a hassle, but I've always heard that this was the preferred way of porting with Wine. It's LGPL too, so there's no problem with linking to it dynamically. Anybody have an insight?
--JRZ
Corel Draw is very, very nice. It's not just a filter-based photo editor, but a suite of programs: an object-based drawing program, a bitmap-based paint program, a simple 3D modeler for doing 3D fonts and such, some utilities to assist with scanning, and a *large* collection of clip art and fonts.
Both the draw and paint packages are well done. The latter is right up there with Photoshop, IMO, but the interface is less cluttered. The whole suite is effectively Photoshop + Illustrator for half the price. This is well worth the $$$ for graphic artists.
I used to think the same thing, until I saw them contributing to the Wine project. Now they've also put together a great distro (or so I hear) and are bringing new applications to Linux.
:)
Say what you want about their motivations or business savvy; they're definitely contributing, regardless. Wine has gone a long way, no one has forced them to take any patches, but many of them needed to be done. (the "boring" stuff--it might help you run MS-Word instead of StarCraft
I'm sure Corel will provide support for their products, too. (now that people charge for that...) Heck, they might do that for their distro, I don't know...
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p ress release
they are coming along. Just very slowly.
________
1995: Microsoft - "Resistance is futile"
If the GIMP's real competition is Photo-Paint, then the GIMP has already won. Photo-Paint has all the ease of learning and use of Photoshop, with all the features of older versions of Paint Shop Pro. Even in the Windows World, Photo-Paint is almost always acquired with CorelDRAW. It's just not worth getting separately. Someone doing only web graphics, or editing and printing their digital photos, can do quite well with Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's PhotoImpact, and anyone doing serious pre-press work will still want Photoshop.
Yes, that would be Helix-Gnome.
-BrentCorelDraw is a vector drawing program.
The Gimp is a bitmap drawing program.
The Gimp cannot edit vector graphics; CorelDraw cannot edit bitmap graphics. The two products simply do not compete.
The Gimp's real competition is Corel's Photo-Paint, which, interestingly enough, will be available for free once released, or at least so says the article. Evidently Corel feels that the Gimp is good enough a free competitor to make selling Photo-Paint alone useless! However, while CorelDraw is definitely the king of vector drawing programs and one of the missing key apps still holding back Linux (no, xfig really does not cut it!), Photo-Paint is far less popular than Adobe's PhotoShop. PhotoShop is one of the few reasons I still boot into WinNT, and I don't see this changing unless Adobe ports a recent version or Gimp 2.0 makes good on its claims.
Cheers,
-j.
Corel can't put up a demo of Corel Office (presumably) because they know that, if they did, no one would buy it. Isn't the current software sales system, which refuses you a refund if the software doesn't work, wonderful?
Don't get me wrong -- I actual use wpo2000 on Linux, because it's better than booting windows. But it really is slow and somewhat unreliable. Screen updates are agonizing.
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Do all the people who think WINE sucks really think that a source port is either reasonable or possible for a major piece of software like WPO2000 or CorelDRAW (or Canvas, for that matter) from a major software vendor such as Corel ina timely manner? Do those of you who think WINE is such a terrible solution actually code, or are you just commentators? Do you understand how WINE is being used here? Can you see the market limitations that a real life company operates under? Good grief.
Anyone have any idea how CorelDraw compares with Visio or Dia? I'd be interested in using it for technical diagrams, although at this point I haven't tried Dia yet. Visio file import/export is also really important for a lot of people.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
OK, any unix-oid with python/tk...
Use sketch, its got a fair few features (I rate it something about CorelDRAW! 2, but with scripting).
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
That said, I think this is still pretty sweet. They have the right focus and direction now, as opposed to 18 months ago and having the photopaint piece available for free is the right approach for the audience that will be using it. Especially the Macromedia Flash support. No one has been able to do this cleanly yet, hopefully Corel will get it right. When the vector engine is final hopes are that the high end color management features will be as rich as they were on the previous releases for the Win environments.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I like corel, but they haven't done so good since they have switched over to doing linux. They are having major finacial problems and have had to lay off a bunch of people. I hope that this can help them get back on their feet and keep putting out good releases.
The only thing worth getting CorelDraw for is the vector editing features, at least on Linux. Maybe it'd be more comfortable or reassuring for the novice, though.
However, I have to thank Corel for their work on the Wine project; things are really looking up there. Although CorelDRAW 9 might not be quite production quality yet because it uses WINE, it would also never be on Linux if it didn't. And it isn't like I haven't seen a "sluggish" or "flickering" GTK application before--that doesn't mean it's GTK's fault! That sort of behavior is as often a problem with the application as it is with the library, and Windows has some very different ideas on how to implement graphics that I'd be happy to deal with just a little flickering for now.
However, chew on this. If this is successful, then perhaps CorelDRAW 10 will be equivalent to--or better than--the Windows version. And if so, maybe all your Windows apps will run natively or get ported to Linux.
All thanks to WINE and Corel.
So I'll think about buying a copy, if I can afford it.
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Photopaint
Corel Draw
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A quick check at CompUSA Onlineshows that full suite price to be $1980.95 and upgrade price is $931.85.
Doing my own search, I find $225 for the stripped down version, and $490 for the full version of Corel Draw alone.
High, but not nearly as high as the figure you quoted.
This is typical of office software, and quite reasonable when compared to the cost of the machine it's going to be used on or of the employee who's going to be using it.
There are almost certianly student versions available for a much lower price, too (around here, student versions are half off or better).
Also, your hyperlink seems to have been munged. Further inspection reveals that they're using some kind of bizzare scratch keys to encode query data, making linking to specific results unreliable.
I've been using PhotoPaint and CorelDraw for windows for about 2 years now. The main reason why I bought it was because it was less than half the price of Photoshop -- the so-called industry standard. Additionally, to buy Illustrator to get a vector based editor as well as Photoshop -- which is pretty much the equivalent to just buying the Corel Draw suite, you can already see the immediate savings. For about 90% of users, whatever Photoshop does better (if anything at all), doesn't justify the ridiculous price for that program (and the same for Illustrator). Compare this with Windows (and Be, Linux, etc.). Redmond can charge whatever they like, just because they are considered a 'standard'. Just as Linux caught Windows flat-footed in the server market -- I think Corel stands to do the same here. They've put in more work, and are willing to charge less for a similar product -- and that can't be a bad thing.
I have to give this pretty good marks, all in all.
Not much to add to the review, I've had good results with it, though. I like some of the features in photopaint, even though I'm still a big Gimp fan, I think photopaint is a good complement to it. Draw is good, also. I don't do a great deal with vector illustrations, though, so I didn't wring it out like it did photopaint.
As for running under wine, I've seen no significant performance issues. Some of the screen updates, etc., could be quicker, but I've found nothing that affects the usability of it.
For comparison purposes, I'm running it on a 400M celeron with 256M ram, and Mandrake 7.1
Wine does seem to be a bit finicky about XFree 4.0 though, but I haven't pursued this enough to find out what's really the issue.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
I like Corel, and used to be a whiz at Corel Draw 3.0 (tells you how long ago that was). However, I don't think Corel "gets" the open source movement. To them, it is just creating a MS-Free platform for them to sell their products on. I really don't think they're going to be a contributer to the open source movement, even with their own distro.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're releasing canned apps for the platform, I just don't think they'll have enough clout to stay around for long. We need more companies like Helix. Sofware needs to be a service-based industry, instead of a product-based one.
Just my $2E-2.
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