Corel Designer Technical Suite consists of five programs:

Designer 12 – a bitmap/vector draw program with loads of technical drawing features
PhotoPaint 12 – once one of the very best photo editing programs, still very useful
Capture 12 – handy screen capture utility
Trace 12 – a real find – an innovative bitmap to vector image conversion utility
VBA – Visual Basic for Applications is the suite's macro language

Designer sells for $699US with generous discounts for upgrades from other software (see the Corel site for details). The screenshot above was taken with Corel Capture and shows the orientation of Corel Designer towards technical drawing. In fact Corel's own pitch on Designer is that “it was conceived with a specific focus on technical illustrators needs for design precision, collaboration efficiency and flexibility specifically with the ability to repurpose old data and drawings”.So as might be expected there are a whole slew of new features designed for technical illustrators:

- a projected drawing mode: sets the Drawing Plane (see screenshot above) so that all shapes are projected in the chosen perspective plane – highly useful saving lots of time;
- better gravity snapping. When drawing or moving an object it is often with the idea of matching up to a node, edge, tangent point, midline or some other feature of a nearby objects. Gravity snapping really speeds drawing precisely because Designer is making the final 5-20 pixel link between the two objects(user choice on pixel closeness sensitivity);
- B-spline tool for drawing curves with no segments; this is a simpler and faster curve tool;
- workspace selector allows users to choose from 4 interface layouts: classic Designer, Adobe
Illustrator, Microsoft Visio or the users own customized and saved Interface Layout;
- new Fillet, Chamfer, and Scallop tools which artisans as well as techs will love;
- new dimensions lines for annotating tech drawings more flexibly;
- ditto for new Hatch fills and line styles for stitching, patterns, and parallel lines;
- eye dropper now copies and transfers not just color but fill, stroke, transformations, effects and other properties of objects;
- support for CGM so that metadata can be attached and edited for any graphic object;
- Unicode and language packs allow quick switching and use of multiple languages;
- improved import/export for SVG, AutoCAD DWG and DXF, Adobe PDF and PSD, Microsoft and Word Perfect Office formats, and DSF.

As can be seen from the list, Designer is moving away from being a pure vector draw program and being moved strongly into the technical workflow. Not only is Designer greatly improved in new technical illustration with its gravity snapping, projected drawing mode and broad sets of transformational features; but it also allows legacy drawing to be easily cleaned up and enhanced with bitmap fills, versatile callouts, easy to use dimensioning and now hot-spotting and data integration with graphics.

But it is the steady improvement in bitmap integration that will be of interest to photo finishing pros. Designer does not have all the bitmap fill manipulation capabilities of say Xara X1 nor Xara's drag and drop ease of manipulation. But Designer allows more precise control of all the graphics within a drawing with its Object and Property Managers respectively.

Control in Designer

Unfortunately Corel has not gone all the way. The reverse is not true – point at an object in the drawing and unfortunately the object selected is not highlighted in the Object Manager. Nonetheless the Object Manager is a good way to help organize and display all the object, layer and curve data in a drawing. But most important, it is neatly linked to the Property Manager.

Once an object has been highlighted in the Object Manager or in the drawing, it is simple to go to the Property Manager and change any of an objects properties:

- the bucket tab represents fill properties like color or gradient or hatch fill in an object
- the pen tab represents stroke properties like thickness, line style, color, etc;
- the 4 corner tab provides basic info about the object and its text settings;
- the Web tab provides URL and image map settings if they have been used;
- the curve tab provides all the x,y position and length data for change;
The Property Manager is not just a convenience but an enormous time saver. Users should always have it on display. However, again Corel fails to make it two-way. Highlight an object and its current property settings are not loaded into the Property Manager. (nor is there a refresh button to tell Designer to do so).Users must always start from the Object Manager first.

Despite the functional shortcomings, Object and Property Managers as a duo are so useful I always have the dockers open whatever workspace style I am using. In fact, changing workspace layout to look like Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Visio, or your own personal favorite is just a Tools | Customization | Workspace click away. I used the Adobe Illustrator starting workspace template because I am most familiar with it and have setup a personal JBSpace workspace layout of toolbars, dockers and menus as seen in the screenshot below.

This brings up a critical point. Designer is so rich with features – we have barely if at all touched on its Transformational, Shaping, Blend, Contour, Extrude, Envelope, Project and other dockers and sets of features. So having the workspace feature and being able to recreate the look and layout of Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Visio or Classic Designer is very helpful in allowing users familiar with those other programs get up to speed quickly in a powerful technical illustration program that is Designer.

Finally, we really like to control colors in a variety of swatches of picker formats. Corel Designer provides an ample array of choices which can be customized and included in the users Interface layout specification. This allows me as a graphic artist to switch working modes very quickly from Custom to Corel to Visio and back - again very useful.

Gravity Versus Stickiness

By the way, Designer does borrow a number of features from Visio but only in a limited way. For example, it has templates for starting design surfaces and symbols as equivalents for Visio's stencils. But even with over 2100 supplied symbols, that is a fraction of Visio's stencils. Ditto for templates. With Chamfer, Scallop, and Fillet settings Designer starts to follow the ability in Visio to lock one or more dimensions so that drag and drop operations on key nodes or edges produce specific design changes to the object. But again, Visio carries this much further than Designer.

Finally, there is the question of stickiness. This Visio feature is approximated by Designer's “gravity snapping”. When you move an object or the mouse cursor prior to creating a new object, Designer offers hints when ever users come close to an existing object or workspace guide or grid. Thus users see the blue hints popping up and disappearing as the mouse cursor is moved over a drawing.

Gravity snapping is invaluable in precision drawings. Designer has extended it by allowing users to turn off and on specific gravity hints such as edge, node, tangent, midline, etc. As well, by holding down a shortcut key such as E for edge, N for Node, or T for tangent – Designer will only look for that specific gravity point. If you release the mouse button while moving an object (or click if creating one )– the object is brought flush with the gravity feature. As noted previously, this is an enormous time saver.

But now comes the sticky wicket so to speak. In Visio, many of these gravity points have a sticky property so that the two objects are automatically combined in a novel way. If you move the combined objects – they do not move en masse as in the case of Designer or Visio's grouped objects. Instead, a node or edge of the combined sticky object stays in place and as you move the object, it stretches to adapt to the new positioning. Only certain objects, mostly lines and connectors, have this elastic stretching ability. Given that the old Corel Flow used to have this feature – it would be very nice in Designer – particularly for flowcharts, landscape and network diagrams.

But gravity snapping has its advantages too. It is only CTRL+G to group the “kissing” objects (and retain separate properties in the combined objects), CTRL+K to combine them (and have the last object's properties permeate the combined new object ), or just a click or two in the Shaping docker to mold them into a new shape. And Designer's dimensioning, callout and many transformational capabilities put it a notch ahead of Visio in the technical rendering hardcore functions. But what also clearly distinguishes Designer is its wealth of bitmap manipulation features.

Bitmap Manipulations

The screenshot shows a Corel Trace woodcut in vector draw format combined with a bitmap image which allows for effects and processing not possible in either mode alone. Also consider that there are two Designer menus, Filter and Effects, that are devoted to processing bitmaps used in Designer as fills or stand alone images. Users of Corel PhotoPaint will recognize many of these 50 plus commands. They include 10 Color adjustments, 4 color modes, and dozens of filtering effects. This goes well beyond what is available in Xara X1 or Microsoft Visio and only ACDSee Canvas X comes close to equivalent features.

We have a demonstration available on the PixofToronto.com of what is possible to do with 16 variations of the Val image all done in Corel Designer. Now this is an example of using an image as a standalone object by means of the File | Import command. However, just as in the case of Xara X1 and Canvas X it is also possible to use bitmap images as fill inside various vector images as shown below:

The whole trick to using bitmaps in Designer is to know that Pattern Fills can be loaded up with user selected images using the Advanced button in the Property Manager dialog(sometimes the Advanced button is hidden because the size of the Property Manager file has been set too small ... just drag the bottom edge to reveal the Advanced button. Clicking on the Advanced button when the FillType is set to Pattern Fill brings up the Pattern Fill dialog. From here it is simple to load in an new bitmap by just clicking the Load button, browsing to the file that has the image you wish to use as a tile and Importing it.

Now the best way to find out how the Pattern fill dialog works is to try it out a few times. One check box not to miss: Transform fill with object. This means that when the object is rotated or skewed the bitmap fill will be too. Users can change the basic size of the fill image with the Size setting in the upper right of the dialog. The other four setting: Origin, Transform, Row or column offset, and Mirror Fill are best explained by simple trial and error. However, it is recommended that the Skew angle be kept under 20 degrees and the % of tile size for Row or Column offset be kept under 35% until you get the hang of how it works.

Designer's Pattern Fill dialog is not as convenient as the drag and drop operations in Xara X1 but it affords more precise control of bitmap patterns used as fill. Again the PixofToronto.com site shows some examples of using Pattern Fills for nifty photo composition effects. Think of the vector object as a very smart frame or container for the bitmap image/Patter Fill. All the editing and illustrating power of Designer is at your disposal to make that frame/container imaginative and creative

Summary

Corel Designer is a rich vector illustration program. In the past two versions it has acquired many more functions and features for use in technical drawing including dimensioning, projected drawing modes and import from AutoCAD plus a range of other technical/illustration file formats. As well exporting capabilities have been really bulked up with new or improved support for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and PDF; AutoCAD DWG and DXF formats; Macromedia Flash SWF, SVG and CGM v3 and v4. In short, as part of the technical illustration workflow Corel Designer 12 is a must consider. But photofinishers who want to do top quality Photo Compositions will also have to take note. The combination of Corel Trace and Corel Designer allows artists to do things in the mixed worlds of vector+bitmap images that are visually stunning.