Corel Draw is SO much easier for editing points. I can do an illustration in half the time. I don’t have to keep pressing A and V on the keyboard to switch modes. I can double click on a line.
These programs are all about editing curves. Whoever makes that easier gets my vote. So much so, I can’t fathom working in illustrator.
I am self-taught in Corel and trained in Illustrator by the way.
The only thing I find illustrator much better in is the layers. You can view and hide every single object, whereas in corel draw you can only view/hide a whole layer. But seeing that Corel makes it easier to edit & select everything anyway, it’s kind of a moot point. A lot of corel users don’t use layers for that reason.
I found Illustrator crashed a lot when there was a lot of nodes in the drawing. Corel appears to be much faster when the drawing is complex. Sometimes, Illustrator gets extremely picky/buggy and I can’t even edit a node.
One reason I see Adobe is the industry standard is because, at least here in Australia, it is on the list of government competency codes and Corel is not. So it is not possible to be officially ‘competent’ in illustration using CorelDraw. Corel needs to fix that. They also need to fix not having a Mac version.
Also, the point about Adobe having better cross-platform compatibility is also not really valid. Corel has no worse support between Painter, Acrobat, etc.
In fact I can even argue that Illustrator has *worse* support than Corel. Why? Because when I import a drawing from Ilustrator to CorelDraw, it usually renders correctly. When I do the opposite, import a drawing from CorelDraw to Ilustrator, it often *doesn’t* work. Especially if there are gradients and transparencies involved. Who’s fault is that? That’s most likely Adobe’s fault/problem, not Corel’s.
The most common software is not always the best. Being the industry standard doesn’t automatically make it ‘better’. In fact you could argue the same about piston engine versus rotary engines. The latter has less moving parts and is a much better, simpler design. Unfortunately it hasn’t caught on.
I got some horrid looks from my design teachers when I told them I used CorelDraw. Sometimes, if Illustrator was not specified in an assessment, I’d use Draw, submit a pdf, and they had no idea until they asked me to submit all original files (probably to ensure that it was my own work). Often though these people haven’t used CorelDraw since the 90s, so it’s not a fair comparison anymore.
You see some absolutely aweful ‘designs’ that people have made in CorelDraw, especially the online tutorials, and that doesn’t do it any favours because people don’t take it seriously.
For me though I think Photoshop is a more advanced program than Photo Paint, so if I want to do some serious photo-editing, that’s what I would use. And I also think InDesign is a great piece of software which has no equal. So I think most designers choose the creative suite because overall it probably is the one to go to and they dont do as much illustration as a pure illustrator would.
I have come to pick and choose my software and I think that is the best way to go.