Buy Now...

A lot of people thought that after the purchase of Micrografx that Designer would either be quietly dropped or else become part of the all encompassing CorelDRAW suite of products. However when Designer 10 arrived the first option was dead and the second became far less likely so here with Designer 12 I think we can say it is safe for the foreseeable future as there are new features included.

For those not quite sure about what this technical drawing product does it has over 4000 industry standard symbols in the architectural, electrical and mechanical fields and these can be manipulated, recreated and otherwise dissected to produce what you may require - if not already created.

See also: Graphic software

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In this short piece I could not even do justice to a couple of the new items so I will not try. I will outline a few – just to wet your appetite – Projected Drawing Mode makes production of 3D objects far simpler. Dynamic Guides an essential enhancement to help positioning objects in relation to each other, essential when several are involved. Finally for now a new B-spline drawing tool. If you are involved in technical drawings – but fall short or CAD – then almost any of the three items mentions will have you reaching for the plastic.

Unlike almost any of the other Corel packages you do not end up with hundreds of extra fonts and that – as far as the loading of Windows is concerned – is a great relief. Another break with tradition is that the product comes on a single CD in a DVD case and therefore – sad to say – has no printed manual. In fact I found the DVD case very disappointing and likely to cause problems as it does not even mention the specifications required to run the suite.

Yes this is not just Designer but also some favourites found in other Corel products. These are PhotoPaint, Trace, Capture as well as some utilities and of course a wide range of import and export file types.

The complete installation (available in English, French or German) is said to need 311MB of hard disc space, in my case it took slightly more at 342MB. One bad habit now developed here is that the product need activation over the WWW within 30 days of installation.

I will print the specifications as Corel seem fit to print these inside the DVD case rather than outside, Windows 2000 or XP, Pentium III 600MHz, 256MB of Ram, screen 1024x768, CD-ROM and Internet Explorer 6. These are minimum requirements and Corel do state that 512MB of memory is recommended.

This a specialised product and as such does not hold mass appeal this leads to the price and as a non mainstream product it is rather expensive. The best prices I could find were from www.mycomputerbits.com who have the upgrade for £199 and the full product for £466. However you can also purchase direct from the Corel site at almost the same prices and they also do downloadable versions for somewhat less.

http://www.corel.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel3Uk/Products/Display&pfid=1047024670800&pid=1047024512114