Controlling text flow is much easier as well, now that you can insert a variety of spaces, breaks, and dashes via the Text menu. First, new Character and Paragraph dockers provide easy access to text-formatting settings such as kerning, typeface selection, and justification. The other big news in CorelDraw is the new and improved desktop publishing tools. The new Step and Repeat docker is more impressive, letting you set vertical and horizontal offsets for repeating objects. You have basically two choices-innie and outie-and objects may have only solid fills. There's a new Bevel docker, but it's a bit underwhelming. The toolbox gets five more tools, two of which are star makers: regular and complex a Fillet/Scallop/Chamfer tool for CAD-esque curve shaping a handy Crop tool for removing unwanted object areas and a Smart Fill feature. Power users gain greatly enhanced EPS and PDF import and export, color management, spot color support, and output. And in case you think Corel is being stingy, there's a comprehensive user guide and a beautiful handbook showcasing stunning samples from expert users of this suite.

In addition, there are two CDs with 10,000 pieces of clip art and images, 1,000 OpenType fonts, 25 Windows Glyph fonts, and 100 templates, as well as help files, tutorials, and videos. The program discs include CorelDraw, the main vector drawing package Corel Photo-Paint, an agile image editor Corel PowerTrace, a fast and powerful raster-to-vector tracing program Corel Capture, a screen-capture utility Bitstream Font Manager, for viewing and organizing fonts Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials, for converting raw camera format files and a duplexing wizard, for printing two-sided documents. The biggest difficulty in installing the suite is deciding what to install.

For 20 years, the company has improved its star product with only a few bumps along the way, and the CorelDraw Graphics Suite X3 shows that the team listens to its audience. It's difficult to fault the Corel development team.

Corel draw x3