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CorelDRAW 2020 is available now.

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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
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.
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Bobby H said:
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.
Click to expand...

Typically with any new release, it's best to let others be the guinea pigs. I would say even that would go even double with the way that people talk about 2019. Hopefully, this would go a long way to putting 2019 in the rear view mirror.

Or if you have a testing rig that isn't used for production, go for it, be able to help see what to expect on your own hardware.

Or can at least wait until tomorrow and check out the webinars and see if there is anything worth even attempting it before the first point release.

A lot of options as long as there isn't a pressing need for the upgrade.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
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.
 
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unclebun

Active Member
I would guess that like before, you can install the new version and still have the old version. I currently have all the versions from X6 up on one of our computers.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
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.
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Bobby H said:
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.
Click to expand...


Should be able to see what fonts are included by looking within the binary archive of the download. Probably have to go rooting around the file hierarchy of the download to find them (or do a search within the root directory of the download for fonts).

EDIT: Now that I think about it, that's probably something that's scripted to pull from the cloud and not locally installed like the example files now until requested.


Bobby H said:
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.
Click to expand...

I am not a fan of that either (and in my world, this is what software vendors really seem to be focusing on and it still sucks, software is vastly more expensive (the cost of Corel by itself wouldn't even cover the tax on said software) and it still sucks). And those tend to be what software vendors are working on. I think the vast majority of people want those features the most. Like with everything, they do have their place, but the user has to know when that place is and when it's not. If they don't know, they end up using it for everything.
 
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unclebun

Active Member
Used Corel 2020 for a couple of jobs this afternoon. They fixed one thing that was messed up in 2019. Exports in 2019 forever and actually made other programs unresponsive for a time--10 seconds or more sometimes. Now they are almost immediate in 2020.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
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.
 
Jim Hill

Jim Hill

New Member
I am using X-8 and love it.
No reason for me to change at this point in time it does everything I need it to do.

Jim
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
JimHill said:
I am using X-8 and love it.
No reason for me to change at this point in time it does everything I need it to do.
Click to expand...

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.
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
VMs are probably going to be the way to go to get legacy software going (providing have an install OS disc/activation # as well).

Sure, one can keep older hardware running in order to run the older OS and related software. A properly spec-ed out computer for VMing, the user will never know that it's not on bare metal. Because the VM software that I use doesn't support some OSs, I have to run a VM within another VM and that inner VM still runs as good as it did when I had it on bare metal yrs ago.

VMing is different from emulation (although there is overlap), emulation takes a huge toll on performance.


I would suggest for those that have older software that want to keep using it, to rip that software to ISO format as optical drives seem to be falling out of favor. Use a disc authoring software, not compression software (although both could be used to create ISOs), unless you know how to tweak format lengths on file names, so that files don't get a truncated file name when burning to an ISO.
 
Christian @ 2CT Media

Christian @ 2CT Media

Active Member
Bobby H said:
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.
Click to expand...
I don't know how true this is... we got an upgrade offer on Friday. we have not subscribed to their upgrade program at all and it was special price of $249. It did say limited time offer, though.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
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.
 
Big Rice Field

Big Rice Field

Electrical/Architectural Sign Designer
I have been running CD 2020 for over two weeks now with only two crashes. It does run faster than 2019.
 
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