Still using 2018 for all my work, nothing in the later versions holds any interest to me and the bugs actively put me off, especially as the bugs I logged in 2018 have not been fixed in 2019, 2020 and possibly 2021.
Anyway today I thought the Enhanced view in 2018 had changed, it looked decidedly unenhanced so I thought I'd check to see what the file looked like in X7. I saved the file in 2018, back to version 17 and attempted to open it in X7.
Not a chance, crashes or hangs Draw every time.
Nothin in the file is exclusive to 2018 , nothing complex only rectangles and bezier curves.
I also saved back to X5 and attempted to open in both X5 and X7. X5 opened it but X7 crashed. Saved the file in X5 and still X7 failed to open it.
I really need to find an alternative application to do drawings in. I have high hopes for Affinity Designer but its nowhere near yet and it seems its being tailored to a userbase who mostly do page layout work or illustrations. Semi-technical drawing is far too difficult, in fact nigh on impossible. However it does beg the question, Serif is not a rich company, where do they find the funds to create this software when they charge £30/$40 for an application?
Maybe not an answer to your question but a fact of life, as you said Affinity is not there and for me I doubt it ever will be. Inkscape is also not there and again the same statement as before.
The above two applications simply don't have the coding costs (in terms of export and internal file creation) of a PDF, postscript, ICC in RGB, CMYK, Greyscale and N Color space compliant application. Let alone an application that allows creation of a document that supports all of this.
Affinity and Inkscape are at best good enough for a limited amount of work., same said for PaintShop Pro with any of these applications if you do a wide spectrum of work they are best used as utility programs. Look at web sites and hard printed examples and it smacks you in the face. To be honest when you've been around as long as I have in today's world, I'm not seeing a lot of good work done in any applications.
With that said if you design for cut glass with one job, a print job for the next that has to go to the web, digital inkjet, digital toner based print, traditional press CMYK. The the next job bag you get has 200 images that require correction to web, RGB and CMYK print.
Unless you're happy working for (in my area) a limited paycheck or as a business owner working their butt off to pay staff , bills and make on many occasions less then the staff you need an application with as wide a capability as possible. That's expensive coding.
I bought Affinity Publisher since I needed to put together a document from multiple sources (PDF's from Draw, word and Excel) and publish to PDF. Worked well , I can have different page sizes within the same doc, PDF output is a breeze and it looks like they are now taking Colour management seriously, though I'm not qualified to judge.
I'll have to try them again, the last I tried transparency was a non starter for them.
FWIW, I have also started to take a closer look at the Affinity suite, and I must admit that I am very impressed about what we get for the money, and the interaction between Designer, Publisher and Photo is amazing (I believe the file format is the same for all three, with the file extension being the only difference).Speed, some tools, features and effects are superior to what we have in Draw, but it is also still missing too many things that I need for my daily work.Excited too see how much can be done with it though, and how much can not.Can I work around the obstacles or will it be, as David says, only a "utility program"?Or maybe it will be the other way around, Designer/Publisher/Photo will be the main program (easy to use, excellent value for money, each version getting better and better) with an old version of Draw in the background to create the missing pieces?I don't know but I am really concerned about the future of Draw.
Certainly I will now use Publisher for one particualr task that I used to use Draw for. I assembled, way back, a number of portfolio files showing photos, I have about 18 of these multi-page files. I'd process the photos in PS, then add them to a multipage Draw file with the images all linked. So if I needed to tweak a photo it would ripple through to the Draw doc.
Problem was, and this remains the case AFAIK, Draw was buggy as hell when working with linked images. Problems like Draw embedding the files at print time or indeed publishing to PDF, you had to remember to save before print and revert after. Problems like the display resolution being all over the place and not able to reset it to anything other than 45dpi. Missing image? trying to relink it was impossible.
Anyway Affinity Publisher seems to have this sorted. I'd like for it to be able to natively import CDR files but they probably think that its a dwindling market so not worth the effort.
I'm going to make a concerted effort to get to know Affinity Publisher and use it for anything I can, reserving Draw for those things I can't do in Affinity Designer. Sorry Corel, but you blew your chance, well not completely yet, but you are on notice, sort your s**t out or we'll all be leaving.
Linking images in Draw, what a joke! Corel has no idea how to do it. I always bought horse power so embedding was never an issue. There are advantages to embedding but there are advantages to linking so both needed to be supported. In my opinion it's worse to offer a feature that doesn't work.
Great ideas (and the list is too long to post) that are put into Draw that have been implemented so poorly that they caused more problems then they fixed. SOP!