CorelDRAW

CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Alludo (formerly Corel Corporation). It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below). It can serve as a digital painting platform, desktop publishing suite, and is commonly used for production art in signmaking, vinyl and laser cutting and engraving, print-on-demand and other industry processes. Reduced-feature Standard and Essentials versions are also offered.^{[citation needed]}

In 1987, Corel engineers Mchel Bouillan and Pat Beirne undertook 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, Corel Capture, and several other pieces of software, it was also part of the first all-in-one graphics suite.

† CorelDraw 10 to X4 can open files of version 3 and later, but certain features may not be supported.
‡ The list of file formats that CorelDraw 10 to X4 can write may not be complete in this table.

CorelDRAW was originally developed for Microsoft Windows 2.1, and versions existed for Windows 3.1x, CTOS, OS/2, and Power Macintosh. Hewlett-Packard announced a version of CorelDRAW for its HP 9000 Series 400 and 700 workstations running HP-UX. With the release of Corel Linux, CorelDRAW 9 was released with package support for Debian and Red Hat-based Linux. Version 11 was released for Mac OS X in 2001, but was then discontinued on both Linux and Mac. CorelDRAW was available only for Windows until the 2019 version became the first to support macOS.

As of 2021,^[update] CorelDRAW Graphics Suite supports Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS, including a new release for Apple silicon. A related web app and iPad app offers collaboration and markup online. In 2024, a new trial version was released available directly in the browser.

With version 6, Corel introduced task automation using a proprietary scripting language, Corel SCRIPT. Support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros was added in version 9, and Corel SCRIPT was eventually deprecated. Support for VSTA (Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications) has been integrated in Windows versions since X5, and currently requires Visual Studio 2017. Version 2019 added Javascript as an option for cross-platform scripting with MacOS support; however, the built-in IDE does not support it as of 2020.

In its first versions, the CDR file format was a completely proprietary file format primarily used for vector graphic drawings, recognizable by the first two bytes of the file being "WL". Starting with CorelDraw 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 just a blank in early versions. Beginning with CorelDraw 4 it included the version number of the writing program in hexadecimal ("4" meaning version 4, "D" meaning version 13). 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 CorelDraw 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 no longer represents a hex digit.