Celedy Draw 2 is a combination vector drawing and desktop publishing program. It offers a surprisingly powerful collection of tools for a very reasonable price.

It would be more accurate to call Celedy Draw a graphic design program because it uses conventions that are common to graphic design programs, such as Adobe InDesign. For example, if you want to enter text, you can't just click the mouse to create an insertion point and then start typing. You must use the Text Frame tool to create a text box, and then create your text within that box. You can resize the box as necessary, but if you want the text to continue on another page, you must create another text box and link the two boxes together. This can be a difficult adjustment if you're used to using a word processor for your desktop publishing needs.

Learning curve aside, Celedy Draw excels at what it was designed to do. It's a good choice for creating short, graphics-heavy documents, such as brochures, business cards, product sheets, and posters. You can create most of your graphics, including logos and charts, within the program, or import graphics from another program in most common graphics file formats, including JPG, GIF, TIF, and BMP. Celedy Draw can export files in these same formats, as well as Adobe Illustrator, EPS, and PDF.

Text import options are more limited. Celedy Draw can only import documents in text (.TXT) format. This isn't much of a problem for home users, but small business users tend to import documents in Microsoft Word (.doc) format. You can still import Word documents, but you must convert them to .txt format first, which means you will lose any document formatting.

Celedy Draw 2 is a good choice for creating short documents, particularly if you want a
desktop publishing program that can also create graphics.

A 30-day trial version of Celedy Draw 2 is available for downloading from the Celedy Software web site.


Pros: Inexpensive, clean and uncluttered interface, extensive collection of drawing tools, includes a variety of templates and a library of more than 3,000 symbols, can import and export many common graphics file formats
Cons: Better suited to creating one- or two-page documents than long documents, somewhat steep learning curve, can import documents in .txt format only