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Re: Ig Nobel documentation

Subject: Re: Ig Nobel documentation
From: John Allred <john2 -at- allrednet -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 17:48:57 -0600

Ventura's early development came out of the SGML world. The code within text files was a swim for anyone with HTML experience. In fact, at one employer, we had writers who wrote their content for our publications as ascii files, and they embedded the formatting codes we supplied them. I could write scripts using Ventura Database Publisher that queried databases and dropped formatting codes into text files to create complex layouts of data. What you could do was limited only by your imagination.

To your initial point, in the mid-80s, I published books using Ventura on a 286 with 640k of memory and, get this, a 20Mb hard drive. Of course, I had to create a discrete set of fonts to conserve disk space.

~john

On 1/1/2020 8:10 AM, Keith Soltys wrote:

Ventura was a great program for its time. Back in the early 1990s used it to publish a science fiction fanzine and it ran acceptably on an original IBM PC that had been upgraded to a 386 processor. Recently, I dug back through my archives for the original files because I wanted to make an ebook of some of the interviews I had published. I was going to OCR the pages, but found that the Ventura files were basically ASCII text with a few codes and some binary grunge that I could easily clean up and dump into Word.

Try doing that with an early FrameMaker file.

Regards
Keith

On 12/31/2019 8:27 PM, John Allred wrote:
I used to be a strong proponent for Ventura, right up until my last update of equipment and OS in the past couple of months. Although Corel ceased upgrades past 2002, I continued using it for above 15 years. Doubtful anyone is interested, but I have some sample docs on my portfolio web site that are incredibly complex. I couldn't imagine learning new software to accomplish what I did back then. One example is a telephone directory for state agencies and employees. Ventura had a bundled database publisher that made this doable, with care and effort. http://nwatechwriting.com/docs/phonebook.pdf, if interested. FWIW, my name appears on page 35.

Just feeling lowly at this mention, since I finally pulled the plug on it this month. I just couldn't make it operate under Win10.

Very sad.

~John Allred


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References:
Re: Ig Nobel documentation: From: Keith Soltys

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