Corel announces the long-awaited CorelDRAW 6.0 for Power Macintosh.
Sean J. Safreed
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM has it that all the smart application-development money is moving to the Windows side of the desktop-computing world. Someone apparently forgot to tell Corel, the 900-pound gorilla of the PC graphics arena. Not only did the Ottawa-based software giant recently rescue the MacUser Eddy Award-winning WordPerfect word processor from the inattention of Novell but it also announced that its first Mac graphics product -- promised over two years ago -- would finally ship this summer.
Apparently these wily Canadians have concluded that there's money to be made in the $13 billion Mac-dominated U.S. publishing industry. Corel is betting that Mac users will jump to its new suite of graphics tools, collectively named CorelDRAW 6.0 for Power Macintosh. Users get a complete set of graphics tools, including CorelDRAW 6.0, for illustration; CorelDREAM 3D, for 3-D modeling; CorelTRACE 6, for bitmap-to-vector conversion; and paint and texture-creation applications.
CorelDRAW 6.0 plans to take on Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand with a host of illustration tools. The package features standard Bezier-editing and text-handling tools; multicolor gradients; bitmap and PostScript-based texture fills; and Boolean tools for trimming, welding, and intersecting shapes.
Lens effects let you create fish-eye distortions similar to those of the Spherize filter in Photoshop. A variety of special effects create 3-D shapes and complex distortions. Bending text is easy with a tool that wraps objects inside a Bezier shape. You can even create pseudo-3-D effects, using the perspective tool. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator filters are not supported.
CorelDRAW 6.0 also addresses prepress needs with support for soft proofing of images. Color matching is supported through two methods: You can choose colors from either the Pantone, Trumatch, Focoltone, Toyo, SpectraMaster, or DIC color models, or you can use Corel's Color Matching Wizard to achieve closer matching. There is also support for OPI (Open Prepress Interface).
Corel took some pains to be a good Mac citizen -- and a preliminary look indicates that it may have succeeded. CorelDRAW supports the Apple Guide help system; ColorSync 2.0, for color matching; and scripting through AppleScript -- features that put Corel ahead of Adobe and Macromedia in supporting Apple technologies.
CorelDRAW may support the leading Apple technologies, but we suspect that other parts of the package may offer less support for them -- CorelDREAM 3D, for example, is a licensed version of Ray Dream Designer, which doesn't support Apple Guide or AppleScript.
Utilities include Corel Multimedia Manager, which lets you browse through clip art and photos. In addition, like its Windows counterpart, CorelDRAW 6.0 includes 25,000 pieces of vector clip art, 1,000 photographs from the Corel Professional Photos collection, and 1,000 fonts in TrueType and Type 1 format. The price was not set at press time, but expect CorelDRAW 6.0 to be priced competitively with Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand, which each list for around $600. 800-772-6735 or 613-728-3733; http://ww .corelnet.com/.
CorelDRAW 6.0 for Power Macintosh offers help through Apple Guide and a host of tools in a comfortable, Mac-savvy interface.
