Developer(s) Corel Operating system | Written in C++, C# Type Vector graphics editor | |
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Initial release January 16, 1989; 28 years ago (1989-01-16) Stable release X8 / 15 March 2016; 11 months ago (2016-03-15) | ||
CorelDraw (styled CorelDRAW) is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. 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. CorelDraw is designed to edit two-dimensional images such as logos and posters.
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History
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
CorelDraw was originally developed for Microsoft Windows 3 and currently runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 . 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, CorelDraw 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 VBA.
Structure
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 in early versions just a blank, and beginning with CorelDraw 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 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 does no longer stand for a hex digit.
There is no publicly available CDR file format specification.
Other CorelDraw file formats include CorelDraw Compressed (CDX), CorelDraw Template (CDT) and Corel Presentation Exchange (CMX).
Use of CDR-files in other programs
In December 2006 the sK1 open source project team started to reverse-engineer the CDR format. 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). Later on the team parsed the structure of other Corel formats with the help of the open source CDR Explorer. 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.
In 2007, Microsoft blocked CDR file format in Microsoft Office 2003 with the release of Service Pack 3 for Office 2003. 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.
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. 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. 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, and thanks to public API it can be freely used by other applications.
Other applications supporting CDR files
CDR file format import is partially or fully supported in following applications: