Serif DrawPlus 7 review

At around a quarter of the price of CorelDraw, FreeHand and Illustrator, DrawPlus 7 has no right to be as capable as it is.

New features include multi-page documents and PDF export. Although there's no professional support for colour management or separation, you can specify CMYK colours and a basic Pantone palette is provided, so you have a fair chance of achieving roughly the intended colour in the final product.

DrawPlus 7 offers a surprisingly large number of the features from more expensive programs. It provides adequate versions of all the standard drawing tools and even a reasonably capable auto-trace function. The Instant 3D feature lets you extrude objects and provides control over rotation, perspective, lighting and bevelling. There's an excellent range of QuickShapes, which are drawn like polygons but range from arrows to speech bubbles and can be altered interactively by dragging control handles - so you might, for example, turn a rippling flag into a humpback bridge. Like CorelDraw, DrawPlus offers both smart connectors and dimension lines. You can also produce frame-based animations and save them as SVG or Flash files.

Impressively, DrawPlus provides a complete range of fill types, including mesh, with a vast selection of useful presets. Not content with this, Serif has also invented its own type of raster effect using bump maps to apply realistic textures to shapes, and it exploits this in dozens of ready-made effects combos. They don't look quite as polished as Illustrator's Graphic Styles, but they're great fun. Transparency is applied as a lens effect, as in CorelDraw and FreeHand, rather than being a property of every object, but it's quite easy to apply and control.

The main limitation is that you can't easily edit the properties of previously drawn objects. Having applied a colour, line, fill or effect combo to an object, any edits you make to that preset are not applied to the object. This means that if you've styled a dozen objects the same way, you have to alter each individually if you change your mind, rather than making a global change. The exception is Scheme Colours, which update globally, although for some reason you're limited to ten of these per document, which is nowhere near enough.

DrawPlus 7 is a great package for home use, business graphics and even dabbling in serious illustration. Until recently, it looked like great value, but Serif will have to watch out for Xara Xtreme.