QUOTE(ejc @ Feb 3 2004, 10:10 PM)
When people are asked to nominate a graphics app. in forums (fora?) nobody seems to nominate Corel. I sometimes wonder why?
From the standpoint of someone who makes a living doing graphics and prepress:
Corel is fine for home amateur users who willonly print their stuff on consumer inkjet printers or want to make Web graphics. If your goal is professional printing or prepress, the Corel suite is a second-rate, poor-quality product that produces absolute garbage for press.
Every aspect of Corel's products, from color separations to color management to color correction to speed to PostScript output, is strictly second-class. CorelDRAW produces some of the worst PostScript output I've ever seen in my entire life, and does not always produce separations the way you expect. Corel Photo-Paint has so many problems I don't even have time to go into all of them--we'd both be here all night.
It's fine as long as you don't use it for professional work, but nothing in the Corel suite can hold a candle to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, FreeHand, or any of the other top-ranked DTP and image editing applications.