Corel Ventura 8

How would you describe a page layout program that can work on pages as large as a basketball court, exhibit all the features of a good word processing application, create or insert tables and charts with ease, and work on bitmaps and vectors as if it were an image-editing program?

What would you say if it comes with loads of clipart, stock photos and fonts, and boasts such futuristic properties as multiple page imposition (PrinterÆs Spread), and yet be one of the cheapest among the claimants to the crown? What if, for no additional cost, the vendor also ships one of the best word processing software available, an image-editing software, a database publisher and a number of publishing-related utilities to boot?

Loads of goodies
WouldnÆt you call this suite a sure-fire winner? Think again. Corel Ventura barely figures as a contender when layout professionals contemplate a new purchase. Intriguing, but true.

Ventura is heavy on the hard disk, a typical installation taking up around 55 to 60 MB, not including the add-on utilities. Like any Corel application, installation is straightforward and easy; you can get away without offering a serial number if you donÆt have it handy. WordPerfect 8 and Corel Photopaint 8 come as bonuses, as does Corel Barista, a technology that lets you publish Web documents in Java programming language with ease.

Other goodies include CorelSCAN, Corel SCRIPT Editor and OCR Trace (quite useful if your writers are in the habit of sending typewritten copies or if you are the kind that lifts pages from foreign publications).

Unless you have lots of RAM, loading could take time, and Corel has this habit of putting out a æWelcome ScreenÆ (apart from the logo) that asks you whether you wish to open the last edited file, or a new one, or another, or a template. Unlike QuarkXPress, Ventura does help you with a short list of files that were recently opened. Ninety-odd templates make the beginnerÆs task easy; a few of them could even fire his imagination.

Limited frame options
Ventura has only one box or frame, whether for text or graphics. Unless you choose to create a box and import text into it, all the text you bring into a file settles on the page on Autoflow mode. Multiple columns on a page can be defined on the Master Page (called Page tag); and you can also create new frames on a page for a different column setup. You can interactively adjust a column width using the mouse cursor, as you do in PageMaker. Text content of a frame can be made to flow into another, and a third and so on, but we found no way to insert an automatic æContinued on...Æ and æContinued from...Æ page numbers.

The frame tool on the toolbar gives you a number of choices for frame shapes: none of them particularly appealing. However, using the node-editing tool, you can create a freehand or regular shape and fill and outline it with any colour, pattern or blend of your choice. You can insert a text as well as a picture into the same frame, one superimposed on the other, but cannot insert two sessions of text into the same frame.

Versatile editing tools
Productivity in text creation and editing takes some practice-and getting used to VenturaÆs unique ways. The æTag WindowÆ which describes styles for characters, paragraphs, pages and the whole publication, could be intimidating to the novice. The Pick tool on the toolbar is the same as the Text tool, but there is also a different Paragraph tool. You must select text with the first to make local changes in characters or character tags. Paragraph tool selects a whole paragraph at a time. You can keep a list of paragraph tags displayed on the screen for effecting quick changes, or right-click to modify the properties of different elements of text.

Editing tools are truly versatile, as in WordPerfect, and you have the option of editing in Microsoft Word as well. Spelling check, Grammatik, Thesaurus, Find and Replace and Type Assist are among the prominent tools. Text can be imported from older versions of Microsoft Word (97), WordPerfect (8), WordStar and some other formats, and exported as RTF or ASCII. Ventura handles tables like a professional, and displays a Microsoft Word Table or Adobe Table with no change. The built-in equation editor is another plus point.

Header and footer frames are integrated with a page, you can create running-in text for headers or footers whose content will change automatically when it meets the next paragraph of the same style-just what the doctor ordered for chapters and sections in a book.

Attention to details
We have never understood why most publishing applications ignore the importance of footnotes and endnotes. Ventura handles these with aplomb. You can insert barcodes, graphs and charts, tables, worksheets or databases in the form of tables and even vector and bitmap images as objects. Automatic chapter numbering or caption numbering as per paragraph tags and an excellent multilevel indexing with cross referencing and TOC feature, place Ventura right up there among the best book publishing tools.

You can work on an imported bitmap image virtually as if you were working with Corel Photopaint. An image imported into a frame takes on the size of the frame, but maintains the aspect ratio. You can create irregular stand-off margins around pictures by working on a non-rectangular frame with the Node Edit tool, but it is neither intuitive nor simple. You cannot move an image within the frame; nor is there any way you can use the frame as a mask or cropping tool.

Corel Ventura shows its true functionality when you try and publish the document as a series of Web pages. If publishing it directly as HTML makes the text lose formatting and the graphics go astray, try publishing to Barista. Just be sure you have the right page sizes and resolution to suit a Web screen. You can also publish to PDF format, employing the usual æprint to file and convert to PDFÆ technique.

If you are a CorelDRAW suite user, and plan to promote yourself in publishing, go straight for the Ventura suite. These two relatively economical packages meet all your publishing, typesetting and image-editing needs. As the clichΘ goes, Corel applications are tightly integrated.

Others:
QuarkXPress 4.04
Adobe PageMaker 6.5 Plus
Adobe InDesign 1.0
Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.6