Information technology software Plan: Operation systems

History

In 1987, Corel engineers Michel Bouillon and Pat Beirne undertook to develop a vector-based illustration program to bundle with their desktop publishing systems. That program, CorelDraw, was initially released in 1989.^[1] 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, Corel Capture, and several other pieces of software, it was also part of the first all-in-one graphics suite.^[2]

Platform and scripting history

CorelDRAW was originally developed for Microsoft Windows 2.1, and versions existed for Windows 3.1x, CTOS, OS/2, and Power Macintosh. With the release of Corel Linux, CorelDRAW 9 was released with package support for Debian and Red Hat-based Linux.^[48] Version 11 was released for Mac OS X in 2001, but was then discontinued on both Linux and Mac. CorelDRAW was available only for Windows until the 2019 version became the first to support macOS.^[49][50][51]

As of 2021, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite supports Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS, including a new release for Apple silicon.^[52] A related web app and iPad app offers collaboration and markup online.

Scripting

With version 6, Corel introduced task automation using a proprietary scripting language, Corel SCRIPT. Support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros was added in version 9,^[53] and Corel SCRIPT was eventually deprecated. Support for VSTA (Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications) has been integrated in Windows versions since X5,^[31] and currently requires Visual Studio 2017.^[54] Version 2019 added Javascript as an option for cross-platform scripting with MacOS support; however, the built-in IDE does not support it as of 2020.