Having a hard time converting to Illustrator from CorelDRAW

[patrickl]

I have alwasy been using CorelDRAW, but since everyone seems to be using Illustrator now, I thought I'd switch. To be honest I can't I'm having a real hard time converting. Tracing seems to be so much easier in CorelDRAW. Although I guess (hope) that I'm just missing some things.

What amazed me first of all was the lack of proper context sensitive menu's (the pop-up menu with a right click)! You get a pop-up, but it's a static selection of the main menu. With Corel you hardly need anything else than the context menu's they contain everything you need specific for the tool you select. Especially the way the anchor points work makes this very confusing. With corel you just right click on a point and see what type of point it is and you can select the other types right from the context menu (cusp,  smooth, symmetrical and conversions to straight line or to curve)

With Corel I was also used to picking up a point on a line segment and then dragging it to it's place. With Illustrator so far I have only been able to adjust lines by dragging those tiny "direction handles". That is very hard to get right when you are zoomed in on the artwork. I can't believe you people get any work vectorized by using these handles only. So please enlighten me and tell me what key/icon/setting to click to enable "line dragging".

Corel has many ways of drawing curved lines (including the bezier style drawing of Illustrator) so I hope Illustrator has more than one option for this as well.

Thing is I really can't seem to find an easy way of laying down the lines in one go with Illustrator. I kinda keep dotting around points and then having to come back to correcting all of the lines. Then this correcting is kinda tedious too since I need to keep dragging the handles around instead of just dragging the line itself (which allows a much higher zoom since you only need to see that the point you lay down is correct and thus you don't need to have a view on both ends of the whole line).

Also in Corel there is a wireframe setting. I did find this in Illustrator too, but then it doesn't show the bitmap anymore! Doesn't that make it really hard to accurately trace shapes? I find myself constantly moving things out of the way. With Corel you just see the outlines of your drawings on top of the base bitmap. Is there a way to show outlines AND the bitmap in Illustrator. So far the only way I found was to remove the fill (and strok, but I don't use them anyway).

Maybe I'm also reading the tutorial wrong. It said to set transparency on the bitmap image. Now that I think of it, the tutorial probably meant for me to set the transparency of the drawings I make and leave the bitmap visible. I'm drwaing on top of the bitmap right? Or should I draw "below" the bitmap?

I started out by reading Frostillicus' tutorial (so no RTFT's please ), but I admit It probably didn't stick in my head all at once.

If I could I'd draw things in Corel I'd stick to it (why convert if what you have works?), but my version is kinda old (version and it can't read the PDF export that Illustrator puts out. Since everyone seems to be using Illustrator I assumed it had some edge over CorelDRAW too.