Over 15 years ago, version one of DrawPlus appeared from the Nottingham-based software house Serif. Having already acquired a reputation for its budget DTP program PagePlus, Serif took on the likes of CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator with its own vector drawing application. Now in version 8, DrawPlus has expanded its feature set considerably: as well as the standard functions of drawing and editing vector shapes, it can handle artistic media, background textures and PDF files.

The most vaunted new feature is the Paintbrush tool. This freehand drawing option produces not simple vector lines or curves, but fully-developed natural media lines, like charcoal, pen, pastel and dry brush. There’s a wide range you can pick from the Brushes palette and they can also be applied as the line type for straight lines and QuickShapes.

Both vector and bitmap brushes are supplied on a separate resources CD and are integrated into the main program after installation. Although you can use the Paintbrush tool effectively with a mouse, DrawPlus 8 also supports pressure-sensitive graphics tablets. This is probably the easiest way to use brush effects.Also included are paper textures that you can add to any object, so you can apply a background to your work that looks like paper, marble, brickwork or any of over 260 other textures.

A recent trend with drawing programs is to provide more scope to incorporate bitmap images, particularly photos, into drawings. To work productively, you don’t want to have to switch applications to make basic photo adjustments. DrawPlus 8 enables you to auto-correct for colour levels and contrast, but you can also call up a separate dialog for many more detailed, manual adjustments.

First, you select the attributes you want to adjust – such as the colour balance or HLS values – and any of the provided filters, like blur and glow, you want to apply. You’re then provided with just the controls needed for those functions, effectively building up a customised control palette for each image in your document. DrawPlus 8 remembers which adjustments you’ve selected and the relevant settings.

You can’t make changes directly to photos you’ve manipulated in DrawPlus 8, though. For example, if you crop a photo into a QuickShape – which is effectively a masking process, rather than a true crop – you have to unmask it again before you can make adjustments to the photo.

PDF performance
No self-respecting graphics or DTP program can move up a version these days without being able to produce, and ideally import, PDF files. Here, you can import a PDF file and publish any drawing directly in the same format. We successfully opened a complex test file, with multi-coloured vector elements and text in several fonts, and produced a fully-editable DrawPlus document. Similarly, we took a test page and published it as a PDF file that Adobe Reader 7 had no trouble in displaying.

As well as producing PDF files, DrawPlus is a good candidate for knocking up all kinds of buttons and hotspot objects for web pages. As well as accessing a wide range of pre-drawn shapes and vector clips, available from the Gallery palette, you can create your own objects out of basic shapes, fills, text and bitmaps, then add a rollover mask using the Image Slice tool. You can define different graphics for the various standard rollover states, then export the objects to your web page.

There are many other more minor improvements to DrawPlus’s feature set, such as the enhanced handling of colour. You can now adjust colours in CMYK, RGB or either of two HSL models. Direct AutoCAD import is also provided, including support for the 2006 version, and selection of individual objects within a group is easily achieved by pressing the [CTRL] key.

What DrawPlus does, it does very well, and the redesigned interface makes it much easier to get at tools and apply effects. The brush and texture tools are useful additions to the program, but are little more than catch-up in comparison with the major players in the market. DrawPlus 8 isn’t going to give Corel or Adobe any sleepless nights, but in its target market – at well under £100 – it’s still a versatile drawing program that is quick and easy to use.