Replacement for DOS Ventura Publisher for publishing book

[Phoebe Minias <phoebe -at- MIT -dot- EDU>]

Hello,

I'm forwarding the following email from a colleague. He is looking to 
replace a very old DOS-based version of Ventura Publisher that is 
currently used to format a tagged ASCII file generated from a database. 
Apparently the latest version of Ventura does not work because it does 
not accommodate special characters.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Phoebe



We have several major requirements:

1. Our data -- the students and degrees awarded -- come from a database. 
 The format of the data export file will typically be an ASCII file of 
tagged data items.  The new software must have very good capabilities 
for importing such a file, and be able to set up templates and "tags" to 
which we can attach formatting attributes (type size, font, etc).

2.  The formatted output includes a table of contents and an index.  In 
both of them, the software is expected to dynamically insert the 
relevant page numbers.  In addition, the entries in the index are not 
displayed exactly the same as the entries in the body of the book.  The 
entries are the names of the students being awarded a degree, but in the 
book a student's name is displayed in First Middle Last format, and in 
the index the names are in Last, First Middle order.  One software 
package we evaluated, for example, can only display in the index exact 
replicas of text it finds in the body of the book.

3. The book is a series of "Chapters", in which each chapter is a school 
of the university.  The book must be able to handle running footers that 
change with each chapter.

4.  We have a lot of international students whose names include accented 
characters and many thesis titles with Greek and Math symbols.  The 
software needs to handle non-Latin characters well (hopefully using 
Unicode, but any mappable system could work).

5. In addition to accented characters and symbols, a single tagged data 
item could include text that needs to be displayed in italics or as 
super/sub-scripts.

6. The people producing the book are under extremely tight deadlines, 
with changes in the database occurring up to the last minute.  The 
process of importing and formatting the text must allow a very high 
degree of automation, with no or very little manual intervention.  We 
must be able to include in the import file or the defined "tags" 
essentially all formatting information.




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