Re: Writing tools: Quark, FrameMaker and others

[fffish -at- zkey -dot- com]

> At 22:37 06/03/2001, you wrote:
> 
> I've just started to get acquainted with FrameMaker (coming from 
> Word 2000) and find FrameMaker very awkward and difficult to use. 
> In my humble opinion, it is not very intuitive and the learning 
> curve is very steep indeed! An additional problem is the 

[snip]
 
> I've never used Quark for any length of time, but I wasn't too 
> impressed with that either... At the moment I wish MacroMedia 
> would bring out a DTP program

Let me reiterate:
 
Ventura has an *excellent* interface.  It is extremely powerful: it
and FrameMaker are neck-to-neck, and both of them blow the out-of-
the-box Quark away (Quark only becomes useful for long-doc publishing
once you drop several thousand dollars on plugins).
 
I recommend that *everyone* at least demo the software. It costs you all of 
ten bucks to get the demo CD, which provides you with a time-limited, 
fully-featured demo -- *all* commands work: the product is 
production-useful.
 
http://www.corel.com/products/graphicsandpublishing/ventura8/trial.htm
 
For a quick (and remarkably ugly--the jpgs are over-compressed) overview of 
the UI, see http://www.universalthread.com/article/345.html
 
Finally, for a comprehensive *and even-handed* comparison of Ventura, 
FrameMaker, PageMaker and Quark Xpress, see 
http://www.coreluser.com/html/vent_table.html

The latter is important: there may be features that you *need* to have, 
that FrameMaker offers but Ventura does not.  Or vice-versa.

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