Corel continues its mixed Roman/Arabic nomenclature with version X4 of the CorelDraw suite. The new release contains the vector drawing program itself, plus Corel Photo-Paint X4 for photo editing, Corel PowerTrace X4 for tracing bitmaps in full colour and Corel Capture X4 for grabbing screens.

It's also good to see a substantial, 460-page manual and a spiral-bound, full-colour catalogue for the 10,000 clipart items and 1,000 mainly BitStream, OpenType fonts.

Despite the heralded redesign of the interface, it looks very similar to CorelDraw X3's, apart from some redrawn icons. You can now choose a different look, though, by switching the workspace to an Adobe Illustrator lookalike.

As in previous releases, most of the changes are in CorelDraw itself. The new table tool enables you to create tabular designs for more than structured data. Cells can be treated individually, filled with text, backgrounds and images, which are masked within the cell borders. Delineated text, separated by tabs or return characters, can be converted to a table and vice-versa. Cells don't auto-adjust to take the text typed into them, though, which is restricting.

Working on third-party documents can sometimes leave you guessing the fonts used. Corel has incorporated the online 'What the Font!' service into X4, so you can highlight text from a page and have it analysed and matched from MyFont's font bank. You can also use the tool with handwritten text, to try to find a font that's close to the writer's style. While on the subject of fonts, there's a new set of high-quality engraving faces, which give a suitably statuesque finish to documents.

PowerTrace, which was much improved in CorelDraw X3, has received more attention in X4. It now offers Centerline trace, which traces the centres of thick lines in line art. Where before you could get ‘tramlines', following each edge of the traced line, now you get a single line running up the middle of each stroke. It's very good on technical drawing, but can get confused on areas of hand-filled artwork.

Colour matching has been improved, too, so you can lock into the Windows Colour System and Adobe's Colour Management Module, to match colours more faithfully between applications. Other new features include a wide range of redesigned templates to work from and new import filters, including one for Microsoft Publisher.

Photo-Paint X4 supports RAW formats from more than 300 cameras, so you can edit images directly. Tools like the new image straightener - which does what you'd expect - and tone curve adjustments for colour settings are already commonplace in most of Corel's rivals and even in its own Paint Shop Pro X2, but are welcome here, too. You have to wonder how long Corel will go on supporting both Photo-Paint and Paint Shop Pro, which have very similar feature-sets.

CorelDraw X4 feels more evolutionary than revolutionary, but the improvements fill significant gaps and are intelligently implemented. The table tool, in particular, should open a lot of new possibilities. With a fair upgrade price, it's probably a worthwhile move for anybody using CorelDraw seriously and it still outstrips Illustrator in some features and overall value.