A drawing package produces images that are made up from coloured lines and shapes such as circles, squares and rectangles.

When an image is saved it is stored in a vector graphics file as a series of instructions, which can be used to recreate it.

Main advantages of vector graphics are:

• They use less storage space than bitmap graphics;
• Each part of an image is treated as a separate object, which means that individual parts can be easily modified.

Disadvantages of drawing packages

• They don’t look as realistic as bitmap graphics.

Examples of drawing graphics packages include CorelDraw, Micrographix Designer and computer aided design (CAD) packages such as AutoCAD.