Video Scripting? Try COREL's *New* VENTURA 10

[Jerry Jones]

I'm having great luck with VENTURA 10.

Here's a review of the new COREL product:

http://www.designer-info.com/DTP/ventura.htm

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Brian Ellis]

I'm a Corel fan (I regularly use 6 of their products) and I used to be a Ventura fan before Corel took it over. They ruined it, well and good. I have since refused to use Ventura and used a different DTP product until I found I could do virtually all I needed with the combination of Draw!9 and WP9. It may be that V10 is better than V 8 and 9, but I ain't going to try, such has been my bad experience.

[Jerry Jones]

Actually, there was no version 9 of Ventura.

Corel did version 8 four years ago and skipped version 9 and this fall went straight to 10.

Yes... I have Draw 7.467 here at home and Draw 10 at work.

I love using Draw 10 at work so I've decided to upgrade here at home to Draw 11.

That means I'll be upgrading Corel Photo-Paint to version 11, too.

The version 10 of Ventura has really been improved:

1. XML import (which doesn't matter to everybody)
2. PDF export (which should matter to everybody)
3. New table tag functionality (great for very long docs)

I consider Ventura to be the best application available for books and long documents.

There's also plenty of integration between Ventura and Draw and Photo-Paint as they're all Corel products.

Draw is easier to use and is best for short documents such as brochures, fliers, short reports, ads, etc.

If you're not a book publisher, then Draw is probably all you need.

If you publish books, then Ventura 10 is the best available.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Brian Ellis]

OK, I don't remember the version of Ventura that I last used, I admit. It must be over 6 years ago. I had used it since (I think) v 2 in the good old Xerox days, as a DOS proggie. Then it was the best available, I agree. I used it to make snazzy instruction manuals for my software, typically 100 - 150 pages, instruments and machines. I'm no longer sure of the version #s, but I think that Corel issued the first Windows version, possibly v. 5, about 7 years ago. This was a truly dismal offering and most users kept on with the earlier DOS version. It was quickly followed by a new version which Corel sold as an upgrade for next-to-nothing to try and recover from their earlier catastrophe. I think it was possibly the following version that was my undoing and I vowed never to touch it again. I had composed my text by the kilometre in WordPerfect for a long manual and imported it into Ventura. I spent a week spiffing this text, with many diagrams, into something presentable, naturally without backing it up (! ), and I was getting it towards the end, really beautiful, with all the usual chapters and everything, when all of a sudden, without warning, the whole bloody project disappeared from the hard disk, chapters, images, the lot. I could find no way to recover them. Natch, I got only a tough cheese response from Corel but I then found on a forum that this had happened to others on large projects. Because I was pressed for time, I made an 'orrible temporary manual directly in WordPerfect and vowed never, ever, to use Ventura again. In fact, I vowed never to buy another Corel software, but this fell by the board when OEM versions of WP suite 9 and Draw! 9 were delivered to me, bundled with a laptop nearly 2 years ago.

I bought a very expensive substitute for Ventura, Quark Express, which was streets ahead in features and reliability but a monster to use. I no longer do any real DTP, and WP has sufficient features, now, to do even quite long documents reasonably well, but I'll never forget how Ventura and Corel let me down. I scrapped all DTP software when I ditched my Swiss corporation a few years ago.

BTW, the review is hardly glowing, either, and it would be a steamhammer to crack an egg for video scripting, as you suggest, Jerry.

[Jerry Jones]

>>> By the way, the review is hardly glowing <<<

I'll quote the last few words of the review:

"for those who are prepared to master it, Ventura offers the most powerful all-round publishing solution available. It always has."

I agree.

If you compare VENTURA to Quark Xpress, you'll realize that straight out of the box Ventura has a much larger feature set.

To get the same functionality in Quark, you must buy EXTRAS called 'XTensions.'

Moreover, you will note that consultant Bevi Chagnon has written a very nice comparison of all the desktop publishing packages:

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/08-01/chagnon.html

If you want a more enthusiastic (not glowing) review of Ventura 10, here is one:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/review/17798.html

I might add the user group for Corel Ventura is intensely loyal:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=corel.graphic_apps.ventura8

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

Yet another review:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,575742,00.asp

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Brian Ellis]

I've used Ventura and QuarkXpress and find the latter was, in those days, by far the superior product, although obviously MAC-oreiented like that abortion of an Adobe DTP packet (I tried PageMaker, as well, but it never was a serious contender).

Quoting reviews, Jerry, is meaningless and a waste of time. If I went to the bother, I'm sure that I could find just as favourable reviews of QuarkXpress and even PageMaker, but I know that it would be a waste of time, as you obviously have an idée fixe that Ventura is the best.

How many reviews have you seen, showing that Word is, by far, superior to WordPerfect? Can you correlate that with a) Microsoft and Corel advertising revenues in the mags which publish them b) their respective popularity andc) the truth? You can say the same between Premiere and MSP. The more clout a software company has, the better the reviews, irrespective of thequality of the products.

I would have thought that a guy of your obvious intelligence would have learnt to take what you read with a large pinch of salt, although I don't necessarily recommend the degree of cynicism that I've acquired

I know, when you read a review of something you have, there is always something with which you don't agree, often several things. These errors are often terribly misleading for those who are considering the purchase. When you and I link here to a review, we are effectively endorsing the product to members of this forum. You recently tacitly endorsed the Gateway 42" plasma TV. Have you even seen one in operation?

I value what I read from your keyboard on subjects where you have hands-on knowledge. I very respectfully request a little more circumspection from anyone, not just you, about reporting third party information which may not be wholly accurate or may be biased because of vested interests.

Sorry, no hard feelings, I hope!

Best regards,

Brian

[Jerry Jones]

Brian,

Some of your comments are simply absurd and offensive.

For example, you've accused me of posting a review to a plasma TV and you claim that I am, in effect, "endorsing" that product by doing so.

Brian, YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT.

That product hasn't even SHIPPED!!!

I posted about the Gateway to convey the fact this particular manufacturer's PRICE signals a new level of competition that should bring the cost of these widescreen sets down to what's affordable for people within a short period of time.

As for my experience, what are you smoking?

Brian, I've spent more than a decade of my career in journalism.

Not just television journalism, but newspaper journalism as well.

Ventura... out of the box... simply has more tools than QuarkXpress and the consultant who wrote this article for the prestigious 'Journal of Electronic Publishing' agrees with my assertion:

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/08-01/chagnon.html

QUOTE:

"Ventura has extensive tools for creating books, catalogs, journals, scientific, academic, technical, and other multi-chapter documents. It handles footnotes and complex tables that run over several pages superbly, and can generate tables of contents, indices, interactive cross-references, and dynamic running headers and footers. Its book-management features are excellent. The Navigator palette shows not only every chapter in a book, but expands to show every text and graphic file that is in each chapter. This feature makes it much easier to find and manage all the components of large publications."

"QuarkXPress is the industry standard for professional designers and publishers. Third-party vendors have created hundreds of extensions that add features to fill out the toolset, especially for books, long documents, advertisements and newspapers. However, those extensions cost $100 to $300 or more, adding to the total cost of a full-featured set of tools, and many of those features are already built into the other desktop-publishing programs."

You have admitted you haven't even used the latest versions of Ventura.

You base your views on a bad experience you had with an ANCIENT version.

Moreover, who is to say you didn't misconfigure your computer system?

For you to point the finger and demand more 'circumspection' from others after you have posted such a weak case for trashing Ventura smacks of hypocrisy.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

I've been using Corel Draw since version 3. Here's my take:

Version 3 - I loved this program, it's the one that got me hooked on Corel Draw. Most of the good features were there and it was lean and stable. It ran relatively well on my 486 SX-20!

Version 5 - I believe this was the last Win16 version of this software. There were some features updated but it taxed my old P5 90. I probably should have stayed with version 3. VENTURA was packaged with 5. Actually, it wasn't ready when C5 shipped so the disc came a few weeks later. I remember this program being somewhat of a mess. Unstable, extremely slow, and very user un-friendly.

Version 8 - This was the most "buggy" version of the three I had been using.

Version 9 - That's where I am now. It's 100% stable and I didn't even install the updates. Why install them if it's working? The way I look at it things can only get worse!

Any reason to upgrade from 9 to 10 or 11?

[Jerry Jones]

I would say individual needs vary and, therefore, the need to upgrade varies.

But the reason I want to upgrade to version 11 here at home is the built-in PDF functionality *and* the improvements to Corel R.A.V.E. II, which is the FLASH animation program bundled with DRAW.

The reason I want the upgraded version of R.A.V.E. is I'm finding Macromedia Flash so extremely difficult to learn.

I find the Corel Draw interface, on the other hand, to be very user friendly and since R.A.V.E. II essentially is the same as the Corel Draw interface with FLASH functionality, I think I'll be able to get a lot of mileage for my video animations.

I have version 10 at work.

If you install version 10, then you'll definitely need the Service Pack 2 to make it stable in Windows 2000... at least that was my experience.

The reports on the Corel Draw 11 newsgroup are that it is the most stable version ever!

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net