How much difference in 12 and X3?

Corel lets you do a trial. Trying if for yourself is the best way of knowing if you should upgrade. Myself, it was worth it for me as I do work for a printer which does lots of spot color and newsletters and business cards. I also use 12 at work out of a concession to the typesetter which is a technophobe and scarely wanted to be stopped from using 8 which was here comfort zone. She is stil using 8 PhotoPaint as she absolutely doesn't want to learn anything new. wOxxOm wrote a script in his blog that easily lets you save to an older version and I find that makes working in X3 quite compatible with another user in he office that only used 12. Learning is what life's about. X3 is a terrific program. If you only work in black and white or in RGB or CMYK, you don't absolutely need X3. If you need to edit .pdfs, place them in books you are building as ads, receive client artwork in .pdf and put it on their forms, you need X3. 12 sees many .pdfs as being corrupt and there isn't anything wrong with them. True, PhotoPaint hasn't had a lot of improvements, on that Adobe has some improvements in nested layers I which Corel would do something like. But I use PhotoPaint consistently and not Photoshop very often. So I must like it. Tracing is much improved and you can assign color in the tracer and even spot color. There are going to be things to edit with a trace, but It is still a great way of getting new cartoons into newsletters. The crop tool works for vectors and for bitmaps and is very useful. Fillets and rounds, another feature I use a lot. Don't like some of the new text features in the paragraph docker so I just don't use it. X3 has a feature like Live Paint in Illustrator, I think I like DRAW's better. You can use the Color Docker or any palette to drag colors in also.