Re: Corel Ventura

[John Russell <johnr -at- BRS -dot- COM>]

>Barb Philbrick's 'hello' message (hi Barb) mentioned Corel Ventura.
>I am a longtime Ventura user, and I currently have the latest
>Windows version (I think it's 4.1.1). I haven't been able to find
>out much about Corel Ventura in comparison to my version, and I
>wonder:

>        -Is it worth upgrading?

>        -Any idea what Corel's plans are for enhancing Ventura (if any)
>         now that they've got it?


Let me preface my remarks by saying I'm not a Ventura fan.

My company recently upgraded to Corel Ventura 4.2.  To be honest about
it, it's a nicer interface on the same old machine.  Your graphics still
have to be .tif or .gem, you can't import other Windows publishing files
such as Microsoft Word, AmiPro, etc...although you can still import
WordPerfect files.  Once you're in Ventura, your ascii file will have to
be processed should you want to move it to another tool... blah blah blah.

The nicest thing is that you get this cool CD with over 10,000 clipart
images!  (But that's Corel's product.)

You get a bunch of other stuff, too.  Corel really sweatened the pot to
keep its customer base loyal.  But there's nothing really *NEW* in it.


But I have another question, and let me preface it by pointing out that
I'm relatively new to this group.  But my question is:  what publishing
tools are people using out there?  I ask because since I've been working
where I am now, I've used:

        Ventura (DOS-GEM)
        Ventura (Gold Series Windows Edition)
        Corel Ventura 4.2
        FrameMaker 3.0
        Microsoft Word 2.0a and 6.0a
        WordPerfect (DOS 5.1)
        WordPerfect for Windows (5.1?)
        WordPerfect for Windows 6.0

A coworker has many positive things to say about AmiPro as well, but I
have not used AmiPro myself.

You might call some of these "desktop publishers" and others "high level
word processors."  But of all of them, I find FrameMaker and Mircosoft
Word to be the nicest.  I think WordPerfect and Ventura fell out of the
race by taking so long to put together a nice Windows interface with some
cool functionality.  (WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows is quite nice, even
better than Corel Ventura...so far anyway.)

Recently our department was handed some documentation from our London
office that was all in Microsoft Word (2.0a) format.  Not having the
time to bring them into Ventura, we just picked up Word (6.0a) and
started using it.  My boss is working on a large document (approx. 600
7x9 pages) without any problems, and I have produced several smaller
documents (50 pages each) and produced postscript output for printing.
There are some quirks about it, but nothing devastating, and quite
frankly, I have seen no other tool that gives you the macro writing
facility that Word does.  I have used WordBasic macros extensively to
process text, even to the point of taking a Ventura text file and
completely reformatting it in Word (as well as some other tricks).

But what does anyone think about these products?  Or is this a "dead"
topic?


--

kjr
johnr -at- lurch -dot- brs -dot- com

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