Corel Ventura 8 Complete package

...can be quite challenging, as Corel have opted to make more difficult tasks easy and straightforward, whilst tasks that would be easier in Quark (such as column alignment) are much more fiddly.

Luckily though Corel has a great on-line (non-internet) help facility and tutorial, although the tutorial concentrates on the mainstream user and may not compliment your business's activity.

You can produce very high quality pages ...
...fault seems common with all Corel products is that it has an apparant incompatibilty with Windows NT (with old Service Packs) and Windows 95. These problems seem to occur due to the raw hunger for memory that Ventura seems to have. If possible I would strongly recommend that Ventura is ran on a machine that has no other role; as it can grab memory (especially virtual memory) that other applications had previously reserved!. Ventura can struggle if ... more

I used Ventura during my brief 1 year career as a Publisher.

Before I review Ventura 8.0 - I feel I should first describe the role I played and how I used Ventura. If you want to skip this bit, please see REVIEW>>> marker below.

My company published material ranging from Internal telephone directories to huge databases containing thousands of records. I cannot really go into too much detail about the type of information used, though it would be safe to say that some clients were huge monopolies in this country. We created books not unlike regional telephone directories.

Therefore, most of the publishing work we did involved taking data from a variety of sources, such as SQL databases and spreadsheets, and then creating output text files (fixed width up to and including 500,000 records).

We then took these text files and "drag & dropped" them into pre-designed templates.

>> REVIEW
Using Ventura as a beginner can be quite challenging, as Corel have opted to make more difficult tasks easy and straightforward, whilst tasks that would be easier in Quark (such as column alignment) are much more fiddly.

Luckily though Corel has a great on-line (non-internet) help facility and tutorial, although the tutorial concentrates on the mainstream user and may not compliment your business's activity.

You can produce very high quality pages with Ventura which are ready for the print factory with no need for conversion. Ventura also supports just about any file for Graphics, Text and data.

If you are part of a Print business that would like a cost-effective method to typeset print jobs "in-house" then I would strongly recommend this package.

The beauty of Ventura is also the feature that made my company make the decision to use Ventura as the primary publishing tool; this feature is the ability to design a page layout and then drag & drop HUGE text files containing raw data to populate each page.

However, ventura does have a few minor faults, though you can come to live with them, when compared to the overall power of this package.

The first fault seems common with all Corel products is that it has an apparant incompatibilty with Windows NT (with old Service Packs) and Windows 95. These problems seem to occur due to the raw hunger for memory that Ventura seems to have. If possible I would strongly recommend that Ventura is ran on a machine that has no other role; as it can grab memory (especially virtual memory) that other applications had previously reserved!. Ventura can struggle if other applications are running

The second "fault" is not really an issue with the software, but rather with the market standard, Quark Express. Most people use Quark for DTP, although if you are publishing from data sources, Ventura is by far the best option. Due to this fact, you may have trouble if you want to exchange files with other companies. A mild warning! 

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