Publishing to the Internet

The biggest news on this front is DRAW’s ability to create pages with cascading styles, and optionally, an accompanying cascading style sheet file.

Other additions include a statistics page that can analyze and detail an HTML publishing job, more image output options when creating HTML pages, and several user-selectable options, including one to toggle on and off conditions that will trigger the HTML Conflict notices.

There is also a Link Manager docker, which tracks all links assigned in a drawing and can verify the legitimacy of them. Finally, the new Internet Bookmark Manager makes it easy to assign hyperlinks to objects within the drawing.

This new feature works fine. All of these additions work fine. Everything is fine. Yawn...

Forgive our sarcasm, but we continue to be underwhelmed and unimpressed by the notion that DRAW can function as a Web page creation tool. Any serious Webmaster is going to head straight for a real Web page editor, and anyone who isn’t has much better options in JPEG export or the new PDF tool. We maintain that DRAW’s best contribution to a Web site is its ability to create the graphics. It should leave page creation to other programs.

Other Things

Here is a round-up of all of the other miscellaneous additions, tweaks, and fixes found in version 9.

More Bitmap Effects

Pull down the Bitmaps menu and you’ll think you were in PHOTO-PAINT. For examples of many of them, see what we do to President Clinton in Chapter 23.

Direct to Trace

If you want to convert a bitmap image to a vector object, you can launch CorelTRACE directly from within DRAW. When you are done, TRACE delivers a vectorized copy of the image to your drawing. Very clean. TRACE has more tracing options, and we think it’s a bit smarter this year, too.

Degree of Rotation No Longer Brain Dead

We have complained about this for years, so we will take ownership of this being fixed. If you rotate an object, say, 25 degrees counterclockwise and then 10 degrees back the other way, the property bar will show that the object is rotated 15 degrees. In other words, rotation is now cumulative. In all previous versions, you only knew the degree of rotation from the object’s previous position; now you can know it from its original position. Finally...

Enable Selection after Drawing

A subtle but potentially important new option, unchecking this option means that bounding box handles will not appear (i.e., get in the way!) as soon as you have completed drawing an object.

Enhanced View

With rendering speed so fast, this is now the default view. You can choose any of the other views from the View menu, and you can still toggle the last two with Shift+F9. Unfortunately, that keystroke is no longer hard-wired to begin with a toggle between Wireframe and Normal/Enhanced. You have to do it manually the first time. Our lead author acknowledges that this is nitpicky, but he hates it and yells at it at least twice daily.

Enter Visual Basic

DRAW 9 ships with Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, version 6. Those familiar with VBA can program in a more comfortable environment. Corel SCRIPT is still part of the program and is useful for recording a script.

Canto Cumulus Replaces MEDIA FOLDERS

While some of you will miss MEDIA FOLDERS, very few of you used it and most of you don’t even know what we’re talking about. Nonetheless, managing all of your media—your clipart, photos, Web images, etc.—is a crucial issue for any electronic designer, and there is a whole new breed of software to address this, called media asset management software.

Corel worked out a bundling agreement with Canto to include a lite version of its highly touted Cumulus Desktop media management program. With this program, you can track, thumbnail, and archive all of your media files, including DRAW files.

MEDIA FOLDERS can be added to Cumulus catalogs, so those of you who have invested time with it won’t have to start over.

And Finally...

The winner of the Useless Feature of the Year award: you can assign sounds to CorelDRAW events, as you do with Windows events. Actually, our lead author did find use for this on April 1, when he infiltrated a colleague’s machine and assigned BreakingGlass.wav to Delete Object, Mouse Over Node, Print, Undo, Redo, and Zoom. Poor guy—thought he had contracted the Melissa virus...

It’s Soup

We refer you back to our final commentary on DRAW 8 earlier in this chapter, where we expressed our dismay over Corel’s return to its harried and unpopular 12-month development cycle. No such haste prevailed over the DRAW 9 cycle, and it shows. In fact, every time Corel has taken its time, the result has been noticed by the user community, and we think that the same happy fate will grace this release. Corel’s emphasis was on streamlining, cleaning up, and improving output—those are generally easier objectives than creating a sink full of new features.

We not only applaud the objective, but we applaud the result. We think this one’s a winner.