Dumb question, but could it be something as simple as CMYK values? Lots of people just use a 100% Black, which often outputs as a really dark gray.
Under the Preferences menu in Adobe Illustrator there is a setting called "Appearance of Black," and the default settings are On Screen, Display All Blacks as Rich Black and Printing/Exporting, Output All Blacks as Rich Black. So it's not difficult to get deep blacks in Illustrator, even the user messes up and uses a 100% Key type of black. It's easy to create custom swatches for Rich Black in Adobe Illustrator.
I do a lot of design work in CorelDRAW. I've used two Rich Black formulas in that application. When we were using our old (and now retired) Roland thermal inkjet printer my Rich Black formula was C30, M30, Y30 and K100, which keeps total ink under 200. We received some customer provided artwork once that had all four CMYK values at 100. The ink was literally starting to drip across the vinyl as the print scrolled out of the printer. With our Latex and Flatbed printers I use a 300 total ink black: C75, M68, Y65 and K90.
BTW, I used CASmate and Flexi for design work in the past, and still dabble in it some on our production computers. But I moved entirely to CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator for the design work simply because the type handling is so much better. Across the board the "CAS" apps still don't have all the features of OpenType fully implemented. It took Corel until version X6 to do so. Now Variable Fonts are growing more popular. On top of that Illustrator supports SVG Color Fonts. Illustrator has a ton of great plug-ins available (particularly from Astute Graphics).
