Windows software ports are, quite frankly, a pain. The undeniable advantage of the Mac OS is the ease and intelligence of the interface, and when an application slaps Window-like boxes all over the place, the user has to fight to accomplish the simplest tasks. This goes double for CorelDRAW 6 for Macintosh. A friend who teaches a class on CorelDRAW every so often refers to it as “Satan’s Drawing Software of Choice.” We always did wonder who did the logo work for that Pentagram...
However, there are heavenly aspects of Corel’s package. Priced at the same point as its Mac-based rivals (and single-function applications), Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand, CorelDRAW Suite offers an abundant set of programs and files, clip art, fonts, and more. In addition to the standard CorelDRAW 6 package, the suite includes: Corel ARTISAN 6 (a pixel-based image-editing program that supports most Photoshop plug-ins); CorelCHART 6 (a surprisingly robust graphing package); CorelDREAM 3D 6 (a rebadged version of Fractal’s Ray Dream 4.0); Corel MULTIMEDIA MANAGER 6 (an image database organizer similar to, but not as useful as Fetch); CorelTEXTURE 6 (an easy and fun, albeit slow, texture generator); Corel TRACE 6 (which converts bitmap images into vector formats); Masterjuggler 2.0 Pro (a font organizer); and Corel WordPerfect 3.5. This last is the second-place word processor that just can’t seem to gain ground on the behemoth Word, even though it’s snappier, has an almost as robust feature set, and the entire world seems to hate/fear Microsoft. Whew. Got all that? And Corel is aggressively building inroads on the Macintosh. It is offering a $149 “crossgrade” to current owners of FreeHand or Illustrator. It seems Corel is wagering that Mac users will be so tempted by the value that they’ll grab the package just in case they may want a few elements from this rather heavy box.
Still, CorelDRAW 6 is the main ingredient of the package, and the entire package “value” is rooted in how good this particular piece of software is. CorelDRAW 6 is the PC world’s king of drawing software, with Adobe Illustrator version 4.1 for Windows a distant second, and Macromedia FreeHand 5.5 for Windows lagging far behind. Has the PC world been onto something that we in the Mac world have been missing?
Well, CorelDRAW isn’t lacking in any significant areas, but neither does it have any features so outstanding that it will lure you from the drawing apphcation with which you’re currently happy. It is, to twist a phrase from developers, feature-compliant to high-end illustration software.
The more critical area in which CorelDraw doesn’t quite live up to Macintosh standards is all too predictable: interface. It doesn’t seem that the Corel engineers and development team spent any time at all with other Macintosh graphics apphcations, it’s as though the research done was just for the sake of seeing what worked for Mac OS folk. Instead, Corel has taken the high road and figured it would be better to teach us something about software usability. To that end, it won’t take more than a few minutes of zipping around in CorelDRAW 6 for a typical Mac user to start cursing and spewing out profanities because nothing seems to work. Let’s start with what Corel tried to do to make a Mac more like a PC. First, since we poor Mac users don’t have a right mouse button (we’ll take our carpal tunnel via the keyboard, thank you), pressing the control key flips the mouse button into right mouse button mode. This is useful for Windows junkies who miss their extra mouse button, but not for anyone else. Corel has also managed to retain (and possibly increase) the annoying flicker that occurs when you draw with any tool, or move an object around the screen. Actually, you don’t really “move” anything. You move a generic rectangular marquee instead, which takes some getting used to. Want to switch tools? How about the old DOS convention of tapping the spacebar? And then there are the giant squares for handles that pop up when an object is selected and hide big chunks of the illustration.
Palettes are everywhere for everything... sort of. Other programs without tabbed palettes such as Illustrator and FreeHand (pre-v.7) can effectively turn drawing into a game of hide and seek, but when you’re editing text, it would be nice not to have to pull up a modal dialog box as you have to in CorelDRAW 6. There doesn’t seem to be any regularity to why a particular function is a palette, and how the palettes are set up. Possibly the most annovina thins about these palettes is that moving them causes a screen-wide redraw. Between that and the flicker problem described above, Corel might want to consider affixing an epileptic seizure warning label to the box.
The software is solid overall, opening Illustrator documents with which even FreeHand struggled, and performing fairly complex transformations and other operations without a serious crash. Also, it seems to be uncrashable — we tried, and tried hard, but CorelDRAW wouldn’t break. Unfortunately, many complex operations tend to be slow. Really slow. Even on a very powerful Mac. It’s difficult to ascribe this to anything but bad porting.
What if you threw a party and nobody came? Corel should be asking itself this, as it has managed to deliver an exceptionally valuable set of tools at a low, low price, if you do one of those cool “crossgrades.” Unfortunately, all the software (with the exception of WordPerfect, which was excellent before Corel acquired it) has a Wintel aftertaste to it, which is certain to turn off Mac users. Will Illustrator or FreeHand users switch to CorelDRAW for the Macintosh? Not likely. Much more likely is the reverse — if Adobe ever gets on the ball and releases a current version of Illustrator for Windows.
The final warning: A complete installation of CorelDRAW 6 Suite takes up 240MB on your hard drive. Yeah, a quarter-gig. The CorelDRAW application folder is 43MB of that. Microsoft is finally number two in at least one area...
Alspach, Ted. (December 1996). CorelDRAW 6 Suite. MacAddict. (pgs. 60-61).
Corel Corporation
Applications
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2020-09-15 / 
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Corel_suite_6.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
