I've heard a lot of praises for Ventura in the last months. I must admit I have never used it, since I was a PageMaker user who moved to InDesign. Could you people that know Ventura point out for me please the advantages of this programme over InDesign CS2?
My answer is a little different. I've been a Ventura fan since the earliest days, and encouraged my corporate clients even back then to consider Ventura. (I had the short-lived Macintosh version in production at UCLA for two years.) As a journalist and computer magazine news editor, I was able to meet with senior Corel staff. I told them what I will tell you: feature for feature, Ventura is often the superior solution, but it's real power has never been understood by its corporate masters.
Is that power it's talent for long documents? Or its superior typography? Or the ease of production? These are all important, but what should matter to a corporate client is how the product fits into the corporate mission, and the labor costs. Adobe products are designed to emulate the way graphic artists are trained to work. They take an object, and "glue" it somewhere or other, or do something to it. Graphic artists paid by the hour just love this "feature!" But it has nothing to do with high-volume document production. Anyone who uses Adobe products for catalogs or book-length directories knows the problems. They will remember having to fight dropped paragraphs at the bottom of pages, and the tedious hours of manual touch-up.
Ventura is designed with *document structure* first and foremost. Ventura introduced the masses to the concept of a style sheet. It soon became obvious that this was a great idea, because early DOS versions of Word had a similar design capability. You could take a document and instantly change appearance by switching style sheet. Later, other Word Processors adopted the idea of "styles" but these were never implemented as full "style sheets."
For a corporation, this means that you can spread document production across many departments, even leaving part of it to a database, and be assured that layout will be nearly instant. Workers in other departments can edit spreadsheets or database screens, concentrating fully on content, and leaving document appearance to the style sheet designer. Hundreds of hours of labor costs can be saved because the tedious touchups required by other publishing products are avoided.
This was well understood by large government clients like NASA. But because Ventura's corporate masters refused to produce a UNIX version, Framemaker got the job instead. Ventura would have been perfect, because it has true style *sheets* which could be networked across all the countries participating in NASA. But because Ventura's owners have never understood that it really is the superior Group Publishing Solution, and not just a Desktop Publishing solution, Ventura has suffered.
This Fall, the next version of the Linux desktop will be released, featuring graphic capabilities which exceed the Macintosh. Corel could at least begin to publicly acknowledge its spin-off, Xandros, which produces a Windows-friendly desktop environment. Or it could regain the spirit of the old days and get back to work on a Linux edition. The point is World Domination, after all.
It's been five years since the last post on this one...I guess the defence rests?
I inadvertantly posted the following to a CorelDraw group, so will try again.
As a Ventura users of 26 years expecting to leave the day-to-day battles in a couple of years, I'm interested in leaving my company with a viable option for publishing long (in some cases 1500 pages) directories from an Oracle database. Our magazine group uses InDesign exclusively and swears by it, but I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe it's comparable to Ventura (v8 or v10) for directory publishing.
I'd like to hear from those who have used Ventura 10 and the latest version of InDesign (6?)...is Ventura still leading the field? What are the chances it will still work on the next incarnation of Windows?
Ventura users never die.
They just fade in the memory of the vendor.
Malcolm
Are there (m)any Ventura users still around?
I've been using InDesign since version CS2 -- apart from anything else, I needed to operate in an Adobe-centric environment for the sake of compatibility with files from work -- but that's over -- for now, at least. I've decided to try going back to being Adobe-free for a while, so I've done a clean format of my PC with Windows 7 and put my old copy of Ventura 10 on it. Just an experiment, really, to see how well I manage.
I've always liked Ventura, but in some ways it is showing its age. Experiences probably differ, depending on what material you're processing, but I'm quite glad I have WordPerfect and PhotoPaint on hand as intermediaries, to step files down to formats and versions Ventura can successfully navigate. It drags the workflow out a fair bit, though. For my purposes, perhaps the biggest gap I've noticed in capabilities between Ventura 10 and InDesign CS6 is in typographic tools; I'm sure that several versions of ID ago, Ventura easily outstripped it, but of course ID has had the benefit since then of ongoing development by a dedicated team. I admire what Corel achieves, and will always remain a fan, but I think it is suffering from its diminished commercial fortunes, even with the graphics and office suites that are being sustained.
I dearly wish Corel had the resources to give Ventura a polish. It wouldn't need a whole lot -- it's still an amazingly capable program. If Corel gave it import filters for current document and graphics formats, and better font handling (both of which it could largely graft on from the X7 graphic suite), is there really any reason it couldn't put this app back on the market and into the revenue stream?
My impression from IT journalism I've read is that Adobe's subscription strategy has made a fair number of people look around for alternatives, so it seems timely for Corel to capitalise on that.
I began using VP with the GEM version.
I still have a single customer stringing along using VP and I keep an XP Pro computer also strung along to use it.
The sad truth is, despite VP being a great application, I cannot see Corel ever bringing it into a current state. Never.
With the exception of this one customer, I have long since converted publications over to other applications. Even this customer is making noise about me converting their 100 or so tech manuals, product spec sheets, etc., etc., over to ID. And that's the rub. Too many companies that used VP have switched over. There is no compelling reason to ever trust Corel to switch back. Pity.
Mike
Hi Mike,
It's no surprise that the Ventura user base should dissipate when the product is not being developed or even oferred for purchase. Of course people are going to feel the need to switch to more viable and current options.
But fortunes do change. Only a few versions ago, the reviews I read for Corel, both the graphics and office suites, would say things like, "Does anyone still use Corel?" and talk about the apps as if they were, at best, for hobbyists. (And criticise them into the bargain as being too complex for that purpose.) So I was pleased to see reviews for the X7 release that assessed it supportively as a set of tools for pros; and in fact several comparative reviews in big-name magazines actually scored CDGS X7 over Adobe CC. I hope the X7 release brings Corel the revenue and renewed recognition it deserves.
So I hear what you're saying about Ventura, but I do think upgrading it is something Corel should consider. Even some of the positive reviews identified the lack of DTP capabilities as a significant gap in Corel's suite. (It's also going to need to find itself a better website editor.)
I'm not pretending to understand Corel's product strategy. It doesn't actually make sense to me for Corel to have positioned its graphic suite as a mere alternative to Adobe's, nor its office suite as a mere alternative to Microsoft's. That's okay; that might well be my shortcoming in not understanding. But it seems to me that if Corel *is* basing its strategy on being Another Option, then it needs to broaden its offering to compete.