Trying to compare a straightforward graphics design and illustration program with a product that encompasses a whole suite of graphics and publishing applications is like comparing apples to fruit salad. But if you're a graphic designer working in Windows, you'll want to know about both of these new releases: Aldus FreeHand 4.0 and CorelDraw 5.0.
Aldus FreeHand is a widely used graphics program especially popular for the creation of newspaper and magazine ads and for infographics. It is incredibly successful on the Mac and becoming quite successful under Windows. CorelDraw began as a ``business graphics'' solution but has evolved into a set of graphics and desktop publishing applications plus utilities, clip art, and sound samples--literally a graphics and publishing environment unto itself. Corel has sold over a million copies of the CorelDraw suite, making it the most popular Windows graphics program.
If you were hoping that this comparison would tell you which of these competing products to buy, the truth of the matter is this: After using both FreeHand and CorelDraw since versions 2.0, I can't imagine being without either one.
Kitchen Sinkware Supreme
CorelDraw is updated each year at the end of May. Long-time Corel users are accustomed to this annual mix of joy and suffering: Important new features are often accompanied by bugs, the inevitable result of a rigid release schedule. In working with CorelDraw 5.0, I've found it to be the most stable x.0 release yet. This year's overall improvements to the suite include a general revision of interfaces to make the applications more tightly integrated with each other, improved memory allocation, enhanced file management, and faster performance.
Corel wisely decided not to include in this release Ventura Publisher 5.0, the desktop publishing package it recently acquired from Ventura; the company will wait to include it in a maintenance release. Bundled with utilities for SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) tagging and ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), Corel Ventura will also be available as a stand-alone product.
In CorelDraw itself, one significant new feature, PowerClip, provides functions that users have been adamantly requesting for years. It lets you edit a clipped image without taking your structure apart. If you want an illustration to fill a shape but not go outside the shape, you PowerClip it to the shape. The portion of the object that falls within the shape is visible; the part that falls outside might as well not exist.
The new Lens feature may not be useful to everyone, but it allows you to convert any Corel object into a lens. The lens can magnify, gray out, invert the tones of, or set a color cast to whatever is underneath it. An obvious use for it would be to provide detail magnification in a technical illustration.
Corel has also licensed a PostScript interpreter, which reads EPS files and converts the commands in the files into Corel objects. It often crashed during testing, but when it did run to completion, I was able to get excellent results from Illustrator and FreeHand EPS files. The conversion worked much better when no text was involved or when I instructed the filter to treat text as curves rather than as fonts.
Version 5.0 is miles ahead of previous versions in the range of formats it can import and export. And although CorelDraw has always offered Adobe Illustrator format--the lingua franca of illustration programs--as both an import and export option, in version 5.0 the export option actually works well.
Photo-Paint was completely reworked for this release. It still lacks the power and control of heavyweight tools like Adobe Photoshop or Aldus PhotoStyler, but it does have scanning, retouching, and color-balancing capability, plus the ability to edit in 32-bit CMYK format. The prepress tools aren't bad, and Photo-Paint finally shares the Corel interface. Also newly available are three main types of masking, new filters, canvases, and 50 new brush types. As long as files are maintained in the Corel Paint format, elements pasted into Photo-Paint are maintained as separate objects and can be moved, rotated, scaled, or distorted. You can also now load partial, resized, or cropped images, and PowerClip and Lens are available in Photo-Paint as well as in CorelDraw.
On the type front, Corel has boosted the font selection from 755 to 825 fonts in TrueType and PostScript Type 1. It's easy to install too many fonts and slow even a fast system dramatically. To manage fonts and make it easier to install and remove them, Corel has bundled an introductory version of Ares Font Minder into the suite.
Clip art? The industry's most generous collection has grown to 22,000 selections, and they are organized more logically than ever before. There are also 1000 animation actors, props, and sound files, plus 100 high-resolution color photo images.
The Test
To put these programs through their paces, I created a sample advertisement using each product's tools. I was equipped with an AMD 40-MHz 486 computer with 32 MB of RAM, a Diamond SpeedStar 8-bit accelerated video card, a 300-MB SCSI hard drive, MS-DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1, and a Dataproducts LZR 1560 printer on a server.
The biggest problem I had was that, several times as the review progressed, CorelDraw was unable to open and save my sample test illustration. Basic file stability should be assured before the release of any product. I've also had trouble importing complex Corel 4 files.
In creating the magazine ad (see the screen), I found that Corel was able to perform each function, although the file was huge and ran slowly. As soon as the 3-MB TIFF was placed in an empty document, its file size ballooned to over 7 MB.
I used the PowerClip's map highlight feature to fix the position of the clipped component of the map, and then I used a separate lens to magnify it. I colored the text background behind the city names and rotated and PowerClipped the object into a deformed rectangle. I warped the text using Corel's Envelope feature. Envelope editing lets you surround Draw elements with a deformable rectangle and then apply distortion proportionately to all points within that shape. (Although this feature is not unique to Corel, neither FreeHand nor Illustrator provides it.) Then, to contain the yellow-red-yellow blend, I created a compound shape on the same layer as the map.
Since Corel's leading specifications apply only to full text blocks rather than to individual characters, I had to create the ``Dining & Entertainment'' element in two pieces. Leading suitable for ``Dining &'' was far too great for the ``Entertainment'' line, so I had to break out ``Entertainment'' as a separate element, move it into position, and then group the two elements.
Screen redraws to place the red highlight lines from the city names to the map locations took more than 3 minutes each. The final file size was 7.1 MB, and printing a composite image required 2 hours, 17 minutes. You might as well throw out the TIFF unless you will need it again for another file.
Although I still can't recommend CorelDraw as the single solution for the professional artist, the fonts, clip art, and wide file conversion options make this version a must-buy for the Windows artist. Updates will be forthcoming, offering improved stability and performance enhancements.
The Future of FreeHand
Since Adobe's merger with Aldus, Aldus FreeHand is temporarily being offered by Adobe Systems. However, the Federal Trade Commission questioned whether Adobe's control of Illustrator, Photoshop, and FreeHand would give it an unfair monopoly in the graphics software market. Plus, when Altsys developed FreeHand for Aldus, their agreement included a noncompetitive clause prohibiting Aldus from marketing a similar product until their contract expired. Aldus has agreed, amicably, to give Altsys control of FreeHand beginning in 1995, although Altsys may have another company market it.
In any case, Aldus FreeHand has always been a rock-solid product. True, there are no fractal fills, very limited clip art, and--compared to CorelDraw--only a handful of fonts. But FreeHand has always allowed the production artist a great deal of control, reliable printing, and a fast working environment. FreeHand 4.0 supports OLE 1.0 smoothly and can handle TrueType fonts, but its foundation is PostScript.
Unlike CorelDraw or even Adobe Illustrator 5.5 (see the text box ``Adobe Illustrator 5.5 for Macintosh''), FreeHand 4.0 looks entirely different from any previous version or package other than Virtuoso, the Unix illustration program Altsys released in November 1992. I believe ``Virty'' was the first illustration program to use what Corel calls roll-ups. FreeHand 4.0 gives you floating roll-up palettes with a vengeance, and artists with screen resolutions lower than 1024 by 768 pixels have expressed concern (read ``rage'') over the lost screen real estate. While a quick look at the FreeHand screen shows just how cluttered the interface becomes with several palettes open, many features are available quickly.
Altsys implemented drag-and-drop color in FreeHand 4.0. The color mixer enables four color models: The CMYK mixer is shown at the lower right of the screen; RGB, HLS (hue, luminance, saturation), and the system palette are also available by clicking on the four buttons that appear at the top of the palette. You can drag colors to the color list, to the color wells in the Inspector, or directly to objects.
The Inspector is where almost every text control lives, although certain basic text controls--font, style, and size--are in a separate palette. Eleven palettes now replace 70 dialog boxes, and everything can be kept right where you are working at all times. The disadvantage is that a few functions that used to be attached to keystrokes are no longer available. The new layout has other annoying problems, too, but many FreeHand users have come to appreciate the new approach.
In the screen, the background behind the list of cities should be the same pale green on pale blue that is portrayed accurately on the Corel screen. Many colors simply refuse to display properly; fortunately, they are accurate when printed. Throughout most of the job, I disabled the high-resolution display of TIFF files, which left the screen image coarse and blotchy but sped the screen redraws immensely. High-resolution screen redraws were dramatically faster than Corel's, particularly in the case of zoomed-in screens.
In my mock advertisement, I placed objects using the same method as in the other packages and then created and joined two rectangles to make the frame that holds the gradual fill. FreeHand does not support three-color fills, so this frame had to be duplicated twice. To display the border, I left one copy without a fill. I then selected the other two copies and cut down the middle of the page. With each side of the frame closed again, these inherited the yellow-to-red fill. I reversed the direction of the fill on the element to the right to simulate the yellow-red-yellow fill that the other programs were able to create directly.
After creating and rotating the oval for the zoomed highlight, I selected the map and duplicated it, enlarging the copy to its final size, cut it, and pasted it inside the oval. When I moved the oval, its contents would move with it automatically.
The heading ``Ravenal'' was set, but among these programs only Corel has an envelope feature, so I settled for decreasing the size of all letters except the first and last. I drew the panel for the city names, using the rectangle tool and the Shape Inspector to set round corners. I then colored and pasted the background text inside this panel; the colors are notably inaccurate.
I created the city names and the ``Dining & Entertainment'' text in what I think of as a straightforward manner, with the font, style, size, and leading all set on a character-selection level. Finally, after defining the arrowheads, I placed the key lines with the Line tool. Unlike in the other two programs, FreeHand's Line tool creates 2-point paths without your having to apply the arrowheads or deselect an element before creating the next.
The final file size was 31 KB, plus the TIFF, which is linked--a dramatic advantage where several files or versions will be created using a single scanned image. Composite printing took 43 minutes; outputting the Post-Script code is quite fast, and linking the bit map, rather than including it, is not a problem.
Which One to Buy?
Designing a simpler layout might have left the scales more balanced, given Corel's more accurate color portrayal and more readable palettes. As I said earlier, I believe I need both programs. Corel's clip art and font collection are worth a great deal, and the ability to apply text effects like the moderate envelope operation in this job, as well as the ability to create more radical extrusions and distortions, is valuable regardless of which illustration program you create your final job in. The range of file conversions can be critical, particularly since Corel is the only program that is able to convert any Corel file.
In the final analysis, the operating speed, reliability, and accuracy of FreeHand are too valuable to tempt me to switch for production work, and the current lack of file stability makes it impossible to rely on Corel's product, especially if you're up against a deadline.
G. Armour Van Horn is a production artist as well as a consultant and writer on electronic imaging and prepress. His studio is on Whidbey Island, northwest of Seattle. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at vanhorn@bix.com.