BIOS: Technology Means Business

Not content with just an office suite makeover, Corel has also updated its flagship graphics application. CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 sports more than 40 new and enhanced features and will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese versions next month.

Pitched at both design professionals and small-business owners creating their own marketing materials, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 promises to give you a significant productivity boost. The suite has been designed to simplify the design process for projects of any scale, including logo creation, professional marketing brochures, and eye-catching signs.

Corel claims it has worked with customers from various industries, gathering their feedback and spending days at their deskside to watch how they work. As a result, the latest version of the suite claims to addresses customer needs better than ever before.

Key feature highlights in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 include a new PowerTRACE tool which lets you convert bitmaps into editable vector graphics. For control and flexibility, PowerTRACE generates a colour palette, enabling you to pick which colours appear in the traced result and quickly convert them to the appropriate colour mode (including spot colours).

Accessible from both Corel Photo-Paint and CorelDRAW, the Image Adjustment Lab should make it simple to work with images that have poor colour balance and contrast by offering manual and automatic controls for common colour and tone corrections. you can create snapshots of your adjustments to easily compare each snapshot against the original and choose the best result.

The new Hints docker provides context-sensitive information on the currently selected tool. The hints docker makes it easier than ever to learn to use the tools in the toolbox and also gives longtime users helpful tips that they might not have previously discovered. And with a dramatically improved user interface, the interactive Fit Text to Path tool lets you select text, move the pointer along a path, choose an offset distance if desired, and then click to set the text’s position.

Other improvements should make it easier to select, edit, and format text. New enhancements include controls for alignment, drop caps, tabs, bullets, and columns, text size can be displayed in inches, and hyperlinks can be created for specific characters. You can visually control the flow of text in your designs by choosing from em dash, em space, en dash, en space, 1/4 em space, optional hyphen, non-breaking hyphen, nonbreaking space, and column/frame break.

Built on the power of Corel KnockOut, the enhanced Cutout Lab includes new controls to simplify the process of cutting out image areas and improving accuracy. Enhancements include the new Add Detail and Remove Detail brushes that make it easy to refine the cutout area, Undo and Redo buttons to quickly correct mistakes, and background modes that make it easier to see results.

The new Bevel effect docker reduces the time required to apply bevel effects to graphic or text objects and gives you quick access to Bevel styles and controls, and the enhanced Interactive Contour tool lets you contour objects with optimal curve results. The latest version dramatically reduces the nodes created - sometimes as much as 80 per cent, says Corel.

The Smart Fill tool enables you to apply a fill to any enclosed area, the new Crop tool lets you remove unwanted areas in objects and imported graphics (whether you are working with bitmap or vector graphics), and drop shadow, transparency, and mesh and fountain fills now support spot colours. Import and export filters also provide improved spot colour support for Adobe’s Illustrator, PDF, encapsulated PostScript (EPS), and Photoshop (PSD) files. Spot colour effects are preserved when files are sent to a printer that supports spot colours, or exported to PDF, EPS, PSD, and AI.

Finally, the new Enhanced With Overprints viewing mode simulates the colour of areas where overlapping objects were set to overprint, and you can now set security options to protect your PDF output - controlling whether and to what extent a PDF file can be accessed, edited, and reproduced. In addition, PDF functionality now includes full transparency and spot colour support.

Suggested retail pricing is £329 for the full product, £149 for upgrade, and £85 for the student and teacher edition.

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