Corel vs Adobe

[Scotch]

I've been dabbling in graphic design for a few years. I've exclusively used Corel Draw for all vector related work, and photoshop for any raster.

My question is:

What are the main differences between Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator?

What are each's strengths and drawbacks?.

Are there any features in each that are exclusive to to each of the software packages?


I'm quite happy with corel, but a little curious to what the "competition" might offer differently

Thanks

[PrintDriver]

Please don't flame this thread.
If you have something to offer besides "corel sux" then please write it.
Corel Draw in the right hands is a good program.

The only problems I have with it are:
1. It's PC only
2. Sometimes the exported vectors don't like my sign software.
3. A lot of wide format printers will NOT accept a native Corel file. Has a lot to do with workflow. Some will take them as highres .tif only or as an .eps with all fonts outlined placed in other layout software. Hey, I don't argue with them.

Broacher and Keyare (and several others here) prefer Corel. Maybe they will chime in.

[Scotch]

Thank for the reply PrintDriver.

Im guessing my question has been a controversial issue in the past?..lol.

Is the interface and tools within Illustrator similar to corel?. The reason for my questions is that I'm doing a design job for a fellow DJ. Instead of payment in cash he's offered free Adobe software (his sister works for Adobe). I'm just wondering if I should stick with payment in cash or go for a copy of Illustrator. The design job i'm working on for him is relatively small in payment terms, the value of the software is more than the cash value of the job. I guess I'm just trying to weigh up wether I should go for this Adobe product.

[prepress_goddess]

i'd go with the software - speaking as a prepress operator, i think i've come across maybe 1 or 2 clients in the last 5 years that still use it. The shop I'm with now doesn't even support it anymore. If you decide to stick with draw - be sure to work with your printers in getting them their required format be it native corel file or exported eps or pdf. 95% of the time a file exported out of draw to illustrator will work when final piece is to be printed on the press.

good luck

[carter the artist]

I won't even say anything :)

[Scotch]

i'd go with the software - speaking as a prepress operator, i think i've come across maybe 1 or 2 clients in the last 5 years that still use it. The shop I'm with now doesn't even support it anymore. If you decide to stick with draw - be sure to work with your printers in getting them their required format be it native corel file or exported eps or pdf. 95% of the time a file exported out of draw to illustrator will work when final piece is to be printed on the press.

good luck

Thank you for the reply prepress_goddess. You offer a lot of advice in your post.

I think I'll go with the software. Moreso out of curiosity of what it may offer differently. I've ONLY ever used Corel Draw for vector based designs, THere seems to be a lot of designers that swear by Illustrator and that has ebbed my curiosity of what I may be missing out on. I'm really happy with all that Corel offers, but I've never used anything other to make comparisons with.





A few questions I do have>

Are the 2 softwares similar in layout and tools? or will I need a steep learning curve to learn Illustrator?

Are there significant benefits 'function' wise of choosing Illustrator over Corel?.

Thank you for your time.

[Scotch]

I won't even say anything :)

Please do !

I really am interested in hearing all sides of the "argument".:)

[morea]

As the resident librarian of the GDF, I can recommend these threads, Scotch.
They might help answer your question.

Corel Draw vs. Illustrator (http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8115)

Illustrator or Draw (http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11356)

Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw? (http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4042)

[Scotch]

My bad morea. I should have used the search funtion before submitting this new topic.

Thank you for the links :)


*edit:- Those links answer a lot of questions I had....thanks again morea. Feel free to close this topic.

[rickself]

Hey scotch...I still keep up with Corel. We have a couple of clients that use it, and to be truthful, there are some good things about Corel. It's damn faster than Illy and it does blends easier.
But don't think that the user interface is going to be easy to switch. Corel is Corel. It does most things a little different. But then, you'd think that of Illy. Download a trial version of Illy and check it out.

[carter the artist]

I just didn't want to say anything, because last time I brought up the problems I have with dealing with the CD files we recieve for large format printing... I find too many problems. The files, in my experience, end up not being 100% ready to print.

[rickself]

I'm not going to sit on either side of the fence either. But that ^^ sounds more like operator error rather than software issues. In almost 20 years of prepress, I've learned to take pretty much what's been handed me.

[PrintDriver]

Nah, Rick, I think it's something to do with the way wide format rips. 95% of my large format guys don't want native CorelDraw files. Some won't take em at all. Like I said, they want .tifs or .eps with all fonts outlined.

[cjoe]

I always thought that large format guys prefered Corel Natives as alot of the software, especially sign writing software ate .cdrs really well? But in the end i guess Postscript is Postscript, so i would use Illustrator just because it lives on a Mac. Maybe with these new Macs i can run CorelDraw, which has always been my prefered package.

I wonder where the Broach is anyway? Haven't seen him around for a while, i always enjoyed his encyclopaedic knowledge of Corel applications.

[carter the artist]

Ouch Rick, are you talking about me or the "designer" who sent the files to me? Either way it's possible. I've only been doing prepress for about 6 months, and I went to school for Graphic Design.
However, as I stated in my earlier post we have problems when doing vinyl cuts because Flexisign tends to translate the pieces into bits and we have to weld or beware errant cuts.
The designs need to be translated over, and truthfully we do prefer ready to print files, otherwise we spend too much time on a project when we are trying to do too many projects.
Not to say that illustrator doesn't have it's faults, but it only deals with transparencies and pdf's exported out of illy.

[PrintDriver]

Most sign shops that have been around a while use CorelDraw.

Large format printing is not necessarily done in a sign shop.

And sign shops with CorelDraw don't necessarily print from it.

I outsource a lot of what you'd call specialty large format (not paper, vinyl or fabric) and all of those vendors have a specific section on their spec sheet for CorelDraw and woe to the designer that doesn't follow it. Most of them basically say in the first line, 'we would prefer files in any other format..." LOL!

[Broacher]

Corel's biggest problem remains its userbase-- the shallow end of the prepress savvy pool. Couple that with a highly bloated feature set that makes creating garbage prepress far too easy. And that's how it's always been marketed too (too often at the prepress stability of it's files).

From an engineering standpoint, technically, Corel's feature set took years, some over a decade, to be copied by AI (and even some of Corel's oldest, such as it's imposition/tiling options and multipage support are still glaringly absent). But, since historically, AI was the first main vector drawing app on the market, and Mac only-- so it's userbase was mostly pros.

Prepress-wise, I've never had any major problems with Corel. But then, I've rarely handed off CDRs, relying instead on EPS early on (I've been using it since ver. 1) and more recently, PDFs. I don't trust the PDF Exporter, though it has some great features, I prefer to print to PS files and use Distiller instead. Of course, the same goes for my AI files.

The UI comparison has changed over the years-- mostly due to Adobe's wise decision to phase in the guts of all their separately developed graphic apps with their common PDF based graphics engine-- which is now quite solid for prepress AND, has served to debabbelize their CS suites UI's tremendously, and made cross-app compatibility very high. Corel's UI, since ver. 6 is still the most customizable one out there-- and again, years ahead in terms of suite integration and transferability. Only-- it isn't nearly as stable, in my experience.

Another huge difference is just how many filter options Corel has in comparison to AI. But even there, AI has been slowly building up it's list as well.

Now, I still use Corel daily-- with my customized UI choices, it's just way too fast to give up. That and the multi-page advantage. I use it routinely for ads, drawings, maps, cards, invites, these kind of quickie jobs. AI has OpenType feature support (ligs, etc.), and when I need better type, I move there. I also think AI's brush sets and calligraphic brushes just feel better-- and the new fill features for cartooning are excellent.

I'm using version 12 -- and too be honest, I'm not seeing any reason to move up again to 13, or X3, or whatever they call it.

In summary, Corel CAN be a very productive product, and solid-- if you know it's potholes and how to drive around them. If you're starting out and hoping to avoid your employability-- I'd avoid it like a plague. It's postscript-messing, bottom-rung userbase has always brought with it professional scorn, and lowest wages if it's central to a job description. Many Corel users get upset when I say that, but it's just the way the world works. It rarely pays to veer from the industry standard tools -- and that's true with almost any profession. If that doesn't matter to you--because you're an independent maverick type, be prepared to fight more battles. If your talented enough, and smart enough to strategically use the pros and avoid the cons, it's your choice.

[PrintDriver]

Hi Bob! Thanks for dropping in on this thread.
Miss you around here.

[Gromit801]

For one, consider going Adobe Creative Suite all the way. Better interaction between the apps, and Adobe provides an app called Bridge, which is an awesome time saver.

[Piscosour]

This is why I wrote some weeks ago...
___________________
You can do things in one minute in CorelDraw that would take hours to do it in Illy...
See below:_______________________________
I design a clothing catalog every year with photos but mainly illustrations (probably 100 hundred sketches + or -). These sketches have a lot of details, labels, colors, etc.. you know clothing)
I use Corel for this kind of project..Why?

I use multiple pages and the problem is that my client always wants to change color specifications (all the time).. for instance, 34 illustrations have Pantone 172C and he wants them to be changed for Pantone 1788C. And I am not talking about full color t-shirts or skirts. I am talking about little details like collars, or buttons, etc, so you would have to dig from label to label... but I have this tool in Corel that allows me to update colors automatically.. magic!! Just with one click (Same concept as style sheet.. CSS)

If I were using InDesign for this project.. I would have to click the right button, then click on GRAPHICS/EDIT ORIGINAL and update the Pantone sketch by sketch..one by one in Illy.. so we are talking about 34 sketches for example ..that would take me.. let me see... I guess 1 hour to change the Pantone. That's a painful process. and BTW going from Illy to ID..from ID to Illy.

It's all about productivity... time... and time is money.

If you think using the combination ILLY/ID I can do it faster ...I am open to learn.


For other kind of project is better to use ID (newspapers, books, projects that involve a lot of text, etc)

[Broacher]

>>If you think using the combination ILLY/ID I can do it faster ...I am open to learn.<<

Pico, I'm not sure if you're saying 'Illustrator/InDesign1' there... but I'm presuming it's just a typo-- nobody in their right mind would even go near ID1. On the other hand, with IDCS (1 or 2) it's not that difficult to do global colour changes of placed spot-coloured AI files. It's handle differently than graphic styles--which as you pointed out, both Corel and AI both support (though it might be argued that there are more options in AI)--but the thing is to do it in a multi-page app, which I agree, is sadly lacking from AI.

Anyhooo.... Use the ID colour palette to add as many alternate spot colours as you need for all the changes. Make sure 'Separations Preview' is on. Place your AI files onto your pages. When you want to change colours, you use the Ink Manager which is accesible through the triangle in the colour palette, or in the print dbox. But all you do is select the 'imported' spot colour in the AI and select a substitute from the 'Ink Alias' drop down. If 'Separation Preview' is on (and all channels are selected), you'll see the results reflected on screen as soon as you close the Ink Manager.

By the way, for the longer-toothed among us, you could always do this with Quark or even PageMaker (via the 'Tint' option), only the results would not display on the screen--only on output.

[Piscosour]

JAJA, sorry Broacher.. (I have a lot of typos probably ..English is not my mother tongue but I try hard) I was saying Illustrator/Indesign CS2.. and I know you have that option in Illustrator as well but not having the multiple page capability makes it impossible to do it fast. I gave a lot of thought in that and I decided to do it in Corel.. it was just the best choice for this kind of project, (and client!!), amazingly faster...