One thing I never quite understood, is that CorelDRAW is not used more often for creating technical drawings. In The Netherlands companies seem to have an unwavering preference for AutoCAD, which is at least 10 times more expensive than CorelDRAW. Most drawings do not require the complex features of AutoCAD; the drawings' simplicity can be constructed with CorelDRAW considerably faster, allowing to apply more visual options, such as line thickness, style and colour, gradient colouring of planes etc. at much lower cost. And in the end, production workers need drawings to make the parts their company needs, particularly 2D drawings, since 3D renderings often are unfit to instruct the employees to craft what they are expected to create.
In
1995 I decided to put things to the test while working for a well known Dutch air carrier company
KLM by creating an
educational drawing to be used for presentations in the classroom for licence training of technicians. It took me 10 hours to draw that image in CorelDRAW and when I attempted to do the same in AutoCAD, I did not even complete one third of the drawing at the 10 hour mark.
 |
Instruction drawing created in CorelDRAW for
the Technical Training Department of KLM airlines |
Besides the slower performance AutoCAD's output was quite less visually appealing than CorelDRAW's. I am well aware of the fact that hard core drafts persons (I worked among them) consider CorelDRAW an inferior product compared to their cherished tool of choice. But still, in this type of work CorelDRAW far outperformed AutoCAD, both in speed as in visual appearance. Then my co-workers said CorelDRAW wasn't able to draw exact measurements, which is an other biased opinion, since it actually is capable of doing that (with the transform tool).
After that argument was debunked they bragged that AutoCAD allowed to work as accurate as four digits behind the decimal mark. That is of course true, and CorelDRAW is unable to match such accuracy. But then, which production employee is capable of seeing the difference between a 0.001 and a 0.0001 millimeters measure with his bear eyes? Not many I guess. For drawing purposes the drafts person only needs to indicate the actual measurement in the measure indication - the difference is invisible in the drawings made by either of the applications.
CorelDRAW has the same layer-capabilities as AutoCAD, more colouring options and more search and replace options than AutoCAD. Engineers can even replace colours throughout a project, line thicknesses or even basic shapes. It can also read, import and export DXF-format images and a lengthy list of other formats (including PDF). CorelDRAW also has a trace function with which bitmap images can be converted into vectors (not overly accurate, but it works). In addition hardware requirements can be more modest when running CorelDRAW, which is an other cost-saving advantage. Besides Corel matching or exceeding many of AutoCAD's drawing features (and trailing in just a few of those) the price of the application is much more attractive than that of AutoDesk's expensive product.
Another thing at which CorelDRAW is quite good is to draw tables that are editable as if working in Excel (visually that is). Some complex technical drawings would benefit greatly from this feature. Also generating and reading barcodes and QR codes could be useful for the production department; CorelDRAW has these features built-in.
Furthermore importing Excel sheets can be used to instantly create a Bill of Materials (BOM) and CorelDRAW is well capable of creating templates for the various drawing sizes to ensure consistency.
Note:
When working with Windows 10 CorelDRAW version X6 is disqualified as an alternative for AutoCAD. It is horrifically slow and not fit anymore for production of technical drawings.
An other Note:
With CorelDRAW X8 Corel rehabilitated itself. It's fast again and the renewed measurement indication method works quite well. They should perhaps drop the annual issuing of a new version, some of which just aren't ready yet (= teeming with bugs). System admins would hugely appreciate a reduced issuance rate of properly working versions as well (particularly since .cdr-files of a newer version cannot be opened by older ones. AutoDesk has a similar update rate and that invariably gives admins a thorough headache too.
Update Nov 26 2017
With its 2017 version CorelDRAW is back in the game again. Many on-the-fly functions that significantly speed up production, an excellent table creation and editing functions and a built-in bar-code generator, all of which Adobe Illustrator and AutoCAD lack. It also converts vector objects into bitmaps easily and fast after which many bitmap editing functions are available inside CorelDRAW, which doesn't require users to leave the program to edit bitmaps in Corel PhotoPaint or Photoshop. Great functionality that other programs simply do not have. On the other hand AutoCAD has incorporated 3D functionality which would be a great plus if it had not been for its insane price strategy.
Given the amount of views of this blog entry, I think I can safely conclude that I'm not the only one considering the possibility to use CorelDRAW (for certain tasks) for technical drawings. For companies that are not into the production of complex high tech products CorelDRAW may be an interesting and much cheaper alternative to AutoCAD. Should the nature of such companies' products over time change towards an increased complexity, CorelDRAW is capable of exporting the DXF-file format which can be opened in AutoCAD. In some cases it may be useful to make use of CorelDRAW's function to generate and read QR- and barcodes, that the program offers. The Adobe suit does not have such a function.
Conclusion
An alternative for CorelDRAW would be FreeCAD, but that program is much more difficult for the designers of a company to learn than CorelDRAW, even if it has the advantage of rendering 3D views of a product to check if there are design flaws, like unwanted intersections and flawed complex routing of intricate parts.
However, FreeCAD's main feature is to also enable designers to make excellent 2D drawings, but as I wrote, FreeCAD has a steep learning curve, to which not all designers can adapt without great time and effort, while CorelDRAW is far less difficult to learn and is capable of enabling a much quicker (and colourful) design process. So theoretically, CorelDRAW could also be used as an additional program to complex and expensive AutoCAD to draw the less complicated parts of a machine or system. CorelDRAW can export and import the .dwg format, making it compatible with AutoCAD to a large extend.
Postscript
In the past years CorelDRAW has lost its previously solid position in the graphic and design markets. The program is still used relatively in the specific production-heavy industries like sign-making, vinyl cutting, laser engraving, vehicle wraps, and commercial printing workflows, in Europe, the US and in India, South-Asia, Latin America and some parts of Africa as well, but it seems to be experiencing some sort of near death process in the past years. Which is a pity; I used to create and edit in CorelDraw and PhotoPaint quite a lot before the turn of the century, but other programs like Affinity, that later was acquired by Canva, added a lot more functions, that made work easier. Affinity was cheap and Canva is free (for the time being anyway), but they do not have the measurement indication options that CorelDRAW offers, which is crucial for industrial production use.
In my spare time I continued to use CorelDRAW, even when I was forced to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for my job for about a decade, because it has several really useful shortcuts, that could be used on the fly, that the ridiculously expensive Adobe products did not have in those days. I must say that I regretted to have to abandon the Corel products, because they served me well in those days, but when development slows down, it is imperative to look for options in programs that keep advancing in order to create more complex graphics, such as technical drawings, realistic vector portraits, logos and cartoons.
