Corel Ventura

[Faith Weber <weber -at- EASI -dot- ENET -dot- DEC -dot- COM>]

Regarding Ventura and Corel Ventura, K. John Russell says:

>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.

I can't speak that strongly in defense of recent Ventura versions,
which certainly have been buggy (the "thousands" of bugs figure
I heard sounds right). But I haven't had any of the problems you're
referring to. I use HPGL, EPS, and various other types of graphics.
We have always (since Ventura 1.0 -- now *that* was buggy!) used Word
or Word for Windows text files, though I have imported Ami Pro
files successfully and someone here is using (ugh) WordPerfect files
in Ventura, as well. In short, I don't think there's any type of file
I've tried to put into Ventura that didn't work, and while Ventura has
taken a serious dive since the transition to Windows, it was one of the
first products to take a wide variety of text *and* graphics formats.

Now that Microsoft, Frame, and other companies have jumped on the bandwagon,
spending more money and using newer technology to produce superior
products, it's easy to knock Ventura. But whether or not it makes any
kind of real comeback into the marketplace, it was a pioneering
product. (Problem was it was developed for a platform (GEM) that never
made it, and it wasn't easily translatable to Windows!)

Anyway, in answer to your question about tools of choice, Gerry, I
think your opinions reflect those of the marketplace. Frame and
WinWord are the hottest tools going according to the people I talk
to. I wish I could use WinWord for our manuals, but I think our
graphics would make it really slow. Of course, at the moment I'm using
Ventura, and it crashes every time I try to change the column width
of a table -- so maybe WinWord is worth trying!! But my feeling is
that unless Corel does some extremely fancy footwork with Ventura,
we'll be heading towards Frame in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback!

Faith Weber
EA Systems Inc.
weber -at- easi -dot- enet -dot- dec -dot- com