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> I'm starting a new job where my primary tool for document creation
> will be Corel Ventura 10. Up to this point I've mostly used Word,
> Pagemaker, and a little Frame and InDesign.
When I first started out I used Ventura, and then moved to Frame and
InDesign (although not for technical writing).
My favorite features in Ventura were the capabilities of have styles
associated with frames, pages, characters, paragraphs (just about
everything) and the way that it handles indices. The export from Ventura to
HTML was also nice because you could associate styles with HTML tags or
export to CSS/HTML output.
> From what I've been able to learn after tooling around with Ventura
> for a few hours, it seems pretty intuitive and (IMHO) a better tool
> than Word. I'm curious to find out if any of you are (or have been)
> Ventura users, and what aspects you find particularly helpful or
> frustrating. Also, if there's anything you wished you would've known
> when you began using Ventura, please pass it along!
Ventura is a feature-rich product, however it is also notoriously unstable.
Version 10 improved upon 8 by a long shot. The multi-user capabilities look
great, but again I never had much luck with keeping them stable. Font
problems can cause problems. Turn off the automatic word completion.
If you are doing internationalization, Ventura only handles European
languages like German, French, and Spanish. My group was forced to switch
programs when we began translating documentation to double-byte languages
like Chinese and Japanese.
Corel has a newsgroup for Ventura that will probably help, too.
However, considering all of its quirks, Ventura has been my favorite tool
for technical writing. It has had multiple level undos for many years. I
was appalled when my department switched from Ventura to FrameMaker to
discover all of the features FrameMaker lacked.
Please feel free to email me about it and I'll be happy to help.
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