Please give us Corel X5

NO!  DON’T GIVE ME X5.  FIX X4 OR I HAVE PURCHASED MY LAST UPGRADE OF CorelDRAW.

Sorry to be shouting but after using version 9 without major problems for years I bought version 11.  What a disaster.  Unstable, very unstable!  Then version 12 fixed the unstableness of 11.  But it had its own glitches in the closet.  I destroyed a relationship of many years with a vendor that provided my company with photo engravings because the quality of the engravings had dropped off.  After a month of finger pointing, I found out that when saving CDR 12 files as Adobe Illustrator, the outlines that were placed behind the fills just vanished during the conversion.  There were also problems with the cross-hair cursor, property bar readouts, program slowing to a crawl (memory leak?), slow printing, etc., etc.  A few problems were fixed with SP1 and SP2 but not the outline problem when converting drawings to AI.  I went back to using version 9.  Now I have purchased version X4 which fixed the outline conversion problem but some of the same old problems are back and some new ones too.

I want this version of DRAW to work as well as version 9 does for me or this is my last upgrade.  I don’t know what I will go to next but it won’t be a new version of DRAW.  Tony, are you listening?  I have been using DRAW since version 2.01.  When version X3 came out without fixing version 12, I just went away for awhile.  I went back to version 9 and stopped reading the forums for years.  The only contact I had with the CorelDRAW community was Foster Coburn’s newsletter.  Then I found that version X4 was coming out and was one of the first to buy it (got the Tee Shirt to prove it).  Some of the problems with version X4 remind me of the version 12 problems.  The one thing that version X4 has going for it is it is stable (most of the time).  At least it is as stable as versions 5, 8 (second issue) and version 9.  Those were the best versions for me.  Things that prevent me from enjoying version X4 include but are not limited to:  Slow printing on non postscript printers, slow launching, s-l-o-w saving, cross hair cursor problems, crappy toolbox icons (at least version 12 allowed you to color them), slowing to a crawl on certain drawings with text and bitmaps, toolbox and drawing page icons not lighting up when selecting tools and missing parts of property bars (this started with SP1 in X4), coarse zooming (this started with SP1 on CDR12), Layer 1, Layer 1, Layer 1, text on curves scrambled sometimes on re-open (version 9 had this problem but was fixed in SP1 or Sp2), dimensioned objects screwed up when importing into another drawing, some white fills open as black in X4, and other problems which don’t irritate me as much as these.  I want to use CorelDRAW and enjoy the features that I paid for.  I don’t mind this being a work in progress and things being fixed with service packs.  What I do mind is not addressing problems with versions and coming out with new versions.  I know you have to sell new versions of CorelDRAW to stay in business, but don’t make me pay to fix things wrong with the previous version or worse yet, pay for a new version that has the same unfixed problems as the previous version.  I won’t do this any longer.  Give me new versions with new features after you have fixed the previous version.  Make me LIKE CorelDRAW again.

John