CorelDraw Studio

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CorelDraw (styled 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, which bundles CorelDraw with bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below). The latest version is designated X8 (equivalent to version 18), and was released in March 2016.^[1] Corel Draw is designed to edit two-dimensional images such as logos and posters.

In 1987, Corel hired software engineers Michel Bouillon and Pat Beirne to develop a vector-based illustration program to bundle with their desktop publishing systems. That program, CorelDraw, was initially released in 1989. CorelDraw 1.x and 2.x ran under Windows 2.x and 3.0. CorelDraw 3.0 came into its own with Microsoft’s release of Windows 3.1. The inclusion of TrueType in Windows 3.1 transformed CorelDraw into a serious illustration program capable of using system-installed outline fonts without requiring third-party software such as Adobe Type Manager; paired with a photo-editing program (Corel Photo-Paint), a font manager and several other pieces of software, it was also part of the first all-in-one graphics suite.

 

Supported platforms[edit]

CorelDraw was originally developed for Microsoft Windows 3 and currently runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 .^[29] The latest version, X8, was released on 15 March 2016.

Versions for Mac OS and Mac OS X were at one time available, but due to poor sales these were discontinued. The last port for Linux was version 9 (released in 2000, it did not 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, CTOS and OS/2.

With version 6, Corel Draw introduced the automation of tasks using a Corel proprietary scripting language, COREL Script. With version 10, support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) was introduced for scripting by what Corel calls now macros. Corel recommends to no longer use the COREL Script language but only MS VBA.

CDR file format[edit]

In its first versions, the CDR file format was a completely proprietary file format primarily used for vector graphic drawings and developed by Corel Corporation, recognizable by the first two bytes of the file being “WL”. Starting with Corel Draw 3, the file format changed to a Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) envelope, recognizable by the first four bytes of the file being “RIFF”, and a “CDR*vrsn” in bytes 9 to 15, with the asterisk “*” being in early versions just a blank, and beginning with Corel Draw 4, the version number of the writing program in hexadecimal (“4” meaning version 4, “D” meaning version 14). The actual data chunk of the RIFF remains a Corel proprietary format.

From version X4 (14) on, the CDR file is a ZIP-compressed directory of several files, among them XML-files and the RIFF-structured riffdata.cdr with the familiar version signature in versions X4 (CDREvrsn) and X5 (CDRFvrsn), and a root.dat with Corel Draw X6, where the bytes 9 to 15 look slightly different — “CDRGfver” in a file created with X6. “F” was the last valid hex digit, and the “fver” now indicates that the letter before does no longer stand for a hex digit.

There is no publicly available CDR file format specification.^[31][32]

Other CorelDraw file formats include CorelDraw Compressed (CDX), CorelDraw Template (CDT)^[33] and Corel Presentation Exchange (CMX).^[34]

Use of CDR-files in other programs[edit]

In December 2006 the sK1 open source project team started to reverse-engineer the CDR format.^[35] The results and the first working snapshot of the CDR importer were presented at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 conference taking place in May 2007 in Montreal (Canada).^[36] Later on the team parsed the structure of other Corel formats with the help of the open source CDR Explorer.^[37] As of 2008, the sK1 project claims to have the best import support for CorelDraw file formats among open source software programs. The sK1 project developed also the UniConvertor, a command line open source tool which supports conversion from CorelDraw ver.7-X4 formats (CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX) to other formats. UniConvertor is also used in Inkscape and Scribus open source projects as an external tool for CorelDraw files importing.^[38][39][40]

In 2007, Microsoft blocked CDR file format in Microsoft Office 2003 with the release of Service Pack 3 for Office 2003.^[41][42] Microsoft later apologized for inaccurately blaming the CDR file format and other formats for security problems in Microsoft Office and released some tools for solving this problem.^[43]

In 2012 the joint LibreOffice/re-lab team implemented libcdr, a library for reading CDR files from v1 to the currently latest X7 version and CMX files.^[44] The library has extensive support for shapes and their properties, including support for color management and spot colors, and has a basic support for text.^[45] The library provides a built-in converter to SVG, and a converter to OpenDocument is provided by writerperfect package. The libcdr library is used in LibreOffice starting from version 3.6,^[46] and thanks to public API it can be freely used by other applications.

 

Corel was founded by Michael Cowpland in 1985, as a research laboratory. The company had great success early in the high-tech boom of the 1990s with the product CorelDRAW, and became, for a time, the biggest software company in Canada. In 1996 it acquired Novell WordPerfect and started competing with the thought of being “Pepsi to Microsoft’s Coke”^[4] as Microsoft Word was the top-used word processing software at the time. Corel was in a difficult position as Microsoft pushed pre-loaded copies of its software onto new computers. This mainly consisted of Microsoft Works office applications, but a variant called Works Suite also bundled the Microsoft Word software.

The company held the naming rights to the home arena for the NHL’s Ottawa Senators from February 1996 until January 2006 as the “Corel Centre”, a venue currently known as the Canadian Tire Centre.

In 1997 Corel sold its Corel ChemLab studio and its “CD Home Collection” consisting of over 60 multimedia titles as well as the Corel ChemLab studio to Hoffmann + Associates, a Toronto-based company. As part of the deal, Corel acquired a minority interest in Hoffmann + Associates and received royalties.^[5]

In August 2000 Cowpland was accused of insider trading and left. A new board of directors was then appointed and Derek Burney Jr., announced that the product line would be split into several brands—DeepWhite, ProCreate, and Corel. However, these plans would be scrapped, and only the Corel brand would remain. Corel acquired the graphics software company Micrografx in late 2001.

In August 2003, Corel was bought out by the private equity firm Vector Capital for $1.05 a share (slightly more than the cash in the company). The company was voluntarily delisted from the NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchanges. Some U.S. shareholders alleged the management benefited from the buyout personally while the buyout price was too low. A lawsuit was filed in the U.S. to stop the buyout and was unsuccessful.

In March 2005 Corel announced that the United States Justice Department purchased 50,000 licenses of WordPerfect (adding to the worldwide user base of 20 million) and that WordPerfect was adding 4 million new users per year thanks to bundling deals with Dell. Corel contended that WordPerfect was the only viable alternative to Microsoft Office, with sales 70 times more than Lotus’ SmartSuite. On April 26, 2006, Corel completed its return to the public market with an initial public offering on NASDAQ,^[6] the same day finalizing the acquisition of WinZip, a well-known archiving software title.

On December 12, 2006, Corel completed its acquisitions of InterVideo and Ulead. The InterVideo acquisition was valued at around $196 million.^[7] In May 2008, CEO David Dobson announced that he was leaving the company to take a senior strategy role at Pitney Bowes.^[8] Dobson was replaced on May 8 by former Symantec executive Kris Hagerman.^[9] In November 2009, it was announced that Vector Capital would be purchasing the remaining shares of common stock in Corel Corporation.^[10] Upon completion, this made Corel once again privately owned.^[11] On January 29, 2010, the shareholders of Corel approved its previously announced stock consolidation, completing the transfer to Corel Holdings, L.P., a limited partnership controlled by an affiliate of Vector Capital.^[12]

In January 2012, Corel acquired Roxio from Rovi Corporation for an undisclosed amount.^[13] Subsequently on July 2, 2012, Corel announced its acquisition of Pinnacle Systems, a developer of consumer-oriented video editing products (such as the Pinnacle Studio series) owned by Avid.^[14]

Having suffered layoffs in 2003, and 2008,^[15] Corel began a near yearly culture of restructuring beginning in 2010, when in the latter part of that year the company’s finance department was restructured and moved to their Taipei office, resulting in significant layoffs at its Ottawa HQ. Restructuring in 2012^[16] resulted in more layoffs. In December 2013 the company’s restructuring resulted in the layoffs of the Taipei locations engineering and quality assurance team. Corel’s Taipei office was the core development centre ofPaintShop Pro and VideoStudio, one of the company’s most well-known photo- and video-editing bundles. The 2013 restructuring led to a complete handover of the product development to outsourced companies, resulting in the inadequate support for pre- and post-purchase customers. The company continued with layoffs in 2014 and once again at the beginning of 2015 with the change of the company’s CEO.