CDR (CorelDRAW Document Corel Corporation, .cdr)
CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. It is also the name of Corel's Graphics Suite. Its latest version, named X4 (14), was released in January 2008.
CorelDRAW was originally developed for Microsoft Windows and currently runs only on Windows 2000 and newer versions. The current version is X4 released (ver. 14.0.0.567) on 23rd of January, 2008.
Versions for Mac OS and Mac OS X were at one time available, but due to poor sales these are now discontinued. The last port for Linux was version 9 (released in 2000, it really didn't run natively, instead it used a modified version of Wine to run) and the last version for OS X was version 11 (released in 2001). Also, up until version 5, CorelDRAW was developed for Windows 3.1x and OS/2.
Several innovations to vector-based illustration originated with CorelDRAW: a node-edit tool that operates differently on different objects, fit text-to-path, stroke-before-fill, quick fill/stroke color selection palettes, perspective projections, mesh fills and complex gradient fills.
CorelDRAW differentiates itself from its competitors in a number of ways. The first is its positioning as a graphics suite, rather than just a vector graphics program. A full range of editing tools allow the user to adjust contrast, color balance, change the format from RGB to CMYK, add special effects such as Vignettes and special borders to bitmaps. Bitmaps can also be edited more extensively using Corel PhotoPaint, opening the bitmap directly from CorelDRAW and returning to the program after saving. It also allows a laser to cut out any drawings
CorelDRAW's chief competitors are Adobe Illustrator and Xara Xtreme. Although all of them are vector-based illustration programs, the user experience differs greatly between the two. For instance, CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme can work with multi-page documents directly; Illustrator only offers a single-page layout view, but it will allow you to divide that large layout in the print options so that it prints on multiple pages. While these programs will read their native file types and vice versa, the translation is almost never perfect. CorelDRAW can open Adobe PDF files: Adobe PageMaker and InDesign, Microsoft Publisher and Word, and several other programs can print documents to PDF using the Adobe PDFWriter printer driver, which CorelDRAW can then open and edit every aspect of the original layout and design. CorelDRAW can also open PowerPoint Presentations with little or no problem.
