Andy D said:
What's your take on the program?
I have CorelDRAW 2020 installed, but rarely use it. I kept CorelDRAW 2018 on my work desktop and X8 on my notebook at home. Versions CDR X8 and CDR 2018 are pretty stable.
CorelDRAW 2020 is a
slight improvement over the bug-ridden disaster that was version 2019. Some of the bugs are gone, but then there are new ones. Just like CDR 2019, version 2020 can just crash right out of nowhere. Just not as often as CDR 2019. You'll be working, then the program freezes and the whole program window just disappears. Poof! Right along with whatever work you did that hadn't been saved.
I frequently use a 60 font super-family called Vito in my sketches. In CorelDRAW 2020 all five bold upright weights (compressed, condensed, regular, extended and wide) all show up as Italic. The font family works perfectly in previous versions of CorelDRAW, as well as Illustrator, InkScape and Affinity Designer. Vito was originally sold by TypeJockeys and now by Dots and Stripes type. Corel apparently messed around with how it handles font naming tables in CDR 2020. That's according to Thomas Gabriel, the guy who designed Vito. I contacted him about the problem.
I've also seen odd behavior with how Corel 2020 handles synced fonts from the Adobe Fonts service. Sometimes fonts just disappear, even though I'm logged into my CC acount and the fonts are working in other applications
or an older version of CorelDRAW.
Zach Starr said:
Just delete Corel, and move to Adobe, things will get alot easier
Not necessarily. Adobe Illustrator has its own limitations. There is a lot of area where CorelDRAW and Illustrator do not overlap in terms of features. I am using Illustrator more and more however.
Several weeks ago Adobe rolled out the AI 24.2 update, which introduced the large canvas feature. You can now create documents with art boards up to 2275" X 2275". That's larger than the 1800" X 1800" max in CorelDRAW. Type objects can be set larger (Corel has a 3000 point limit). Still there's other tasks involving technical drawing where it's faster/easier to use CorelDRAW. But little by little Adobe Illustrator is getting better.
One factor where Illustrator seems far superior is
maintenance. Corel has pushed out only one minor update to CDR 2020. Meanwhile Illustrator has had two significant point release updates and around a dozen minor maintenance updates. Adobe beta program for Illustrator is more open to users. They seem to be paying more attention to user feeback and feature requests.
Meanwhile CorelDRAW is feeling like a victim of abuse and neglect via its private equity bean counter owners, first Vector Capital and now KKR. The pricing and upgrade policy is onerous compared to what CorelDRAW used to cost per year to keep a license current. It's almost like they're trying to sabotage this software so they don't have to develop it anymore. With that in mind, I'm doing a little more to transition toward Adobe.
