Are there any "corel" plans to release a "professional page layout" program, something like Adobe INDD?
That is something we have discussed several times in this forum, but I cannot give information about what is spoken in Corel.In my personal opinion (and I repeat, it is only my opinion) the simplest thing would be to acquire QurkXpress, a consolidated program on Mac and Windows, with extensive experience, and with many users. In addition, many commands are similar in both.
I don't disagree, Ventura would be a complete rewrite and buying another aplication would simply mean interfacing. In my area I only know of two companies using Quark anymore.
We travel in different circles. QXP is still very widely used for design projects & book work (which is my main use for both it and ID). But yep, it lost its install base to ID in the early/mid 2000s.
If Corel isn't careful, if it keeps putting out releases such as 2019, it's eventually gonna lose its install base and be passed around from one investor group to another and that will eventually cause it to die an agonizing death.
Let's look at the past X8 a lousy fontmanager, 2017 the great node screwep, 2018 fixed the nodes and was the best release for years. Then came 2019, the mother of all screwups. CorelDRAW cannot survive unless it is part of a portfolio that supports it. CD cost to much to make right because it's not some one or two trick pony line Affinity or InkScape so it will cost allot to fix and then with the support of an entire portfolio it can be upgraded regularly at reasonable cost.
The question is will the new owners see it as having enough return on the investment to do this?
That's a good question, re the investors.
As regards past releases, yep, 2018 is pretty darn good/stable. As I didn't use (still don't) the font manager, X8 was also a good release for me.
Release 2019 is why I decided to just stick with v.2018 for now. I'll stay off the merry-go-round for X amount of time. Hopefully the warts in the purchasing thing will revert and more stable releases will happen. I don't have too many years of dealing with all this crap from various software developers in my future.
My hobbies don't include computers.
For the fist time in 20 years I'm running 2 versions on my systems, 2018 and 2019. I need the improved PDF output that I've been pushing for 8 years and that finally came with 2019 but the rest of 2019 can just go away.