CorelDRAW 2020 is available now.

It looks like CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 2020 has become available a day earlier than I expected. Corel has two webinars scheduled for tomorrow. The 2020 suite doesn't show up on the front end of Corel's web site. But registered users, particuarly those who signed up for the upgrade protection program, should have received an email about the new version being available now. Here's the product links:

WINDOWS:
https://www.coreldraw.com/en/produc...095.859650974.1583955656-763475774.1578423397

MAC:
https://www.coreldraw.com/en/product/coreldraw/mac/?topNav=en

When I received the email notice at first I thought it could be a phishing attempt. The email included the product serial number in bold print. But it appears to be legit. The bigger question is whether or not to try it out now or maybe wait for the first maintenance patch.

 

I've been watching a bit of the activity at the CorelDRAW user forum. There is a discussion about CDR 2020 in the CDR 2019 Windows sub-forum. It looks like there were initially some glitches in the download links, but they apparently have them fixed now.

Based on what I've seen in the product page it looks like the biggest improvement (at least to me) is the addition of OpenType Variable font support. But that comes with a catch; you have to be running CDR 2020 on Win10 (or the latest Mac OSX build) to work with variable fonts.

A lot of the other new features seem kind of minor by comparison. Maybe I'll know more about that after watching the webinar presentation Thursday morning. They do claim version 2020 launches and works faster than version 2019. I guess we'll eventually see about that.

 

I watched the "webinar" about the CorelDRAW 2020 Graphics Suite this morning. The presentation was fairly mediocre. There was no interactive Q&A session following the overview. That pretty much means they could have made a video of this presentation for anyone to download or stream at their own convenience. That would have been easier than having to schedule a certain time to take in a blurry and choppy looking live stream.

The most notable new feature in CorelDRAW 2020 is support for OpenType Variable Fonts. In the demo they used a particular variable font that doesn't appear to be included in the suite. I'll have to see what variable fonts are included after taking the chance on installing the upgrade. The auto-tracing engine has had some new features and enhancements added. I'm just not that big a fan of auto-tracing in general. Some people in the CorelDRAW user forums have said CDR 2020 does fix some of the bugs that were left unfixed in CDR 2019. But there are still other complaints.

Corel's team spent quite a bit of time talking about pixel-based effects in CorelDRAW and PhotoPaint. Some of the filter stuff was pretty cheesy looking. The image up-sampling functions might have some use.

They also pitched the CorelDRAW.app cloud-based collaboration service. They sold it as being something better than merely emailing clients PDF-based sketches. It might seem more convenient for clients to pull up designs saved in the cloud and be able to add comments and requests to them. But the downside is customers would have some new app interface to learn. Perhaps younger, more technically astute clients might like that approach. But plenty of others just want a simple straight-forward approach, like a PDF file they can print. Some clients don't even want stuff emailed to them. They like stuff printed out on paper.

 

I went ahead and installed CorelDRAW 2020 on my notebook PC at home. They really need to work on the preview visuals with how Variable Fonts react with the interactive sliders in the Text Properties palette. It really really sucks compared to the performance of the sliders in Adobe Illustrator. You might as well type in numerical values in the number fields and wait for the screen to eventually re-draw itself to see how the result looks. I guess if I had a brand new, very powerful notebook PC I would get more of a "live" interactive preview of movement with the variable font sliders. But given the fact variable fonts preview just fine on the same notebook in AI CC 2020 something is amiss here.

Another odd thing: just like in CDR 2019, I've had to go with plain text-only listings in the font menu rather than using the fonts to render font names. Many of my OpenType fonts just don't render any names at all. Just blank listings. The font preview pane still works.

 

You're pretty much stuck with version X8 now. Corel no longer offers upgrades to perpetual license owners.

It's certainly less expensive to not upgrade. But Microsoft and its updates to Windows are a wild card hazard in such an arrangement. Past updates have broken previous versions of CorelDRAW. I remember being forced to upgrade X5 to X6 by one such update. The purchase of a new computer can also force software upgrades.

 

You better read the fine print on that "upgrade" offer. I'm still running CorelDRAW X8 on my personal notebook at home and CorelDRAW 2018 on my work desktop alongside CDR 2020. I frequently see the pop-up offers, usually when I close CDR X8 or CDR 2018. The $249 "limited time offer" I keep seeing is merely for the per year rate on the subscription option. When you visit their web site only two buying offers are available, $249 per year subscription and $499 for a full version that can't be upgraded.