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Subject:Re: TECHWR-L Digest - 16 Jun 1994 to 17 Jun 1994 From:"George F. Hayhoe III" <george -dot- hayhoe -at- SRS -dot- GOV> Date:Mon, 20 Jun 1994 08:43:00 -0400
Mark Rushford asked about converting from Ventura Publisher to MS Word 6.0.
You can write a Word 6.0 macro which will convert the Ventura tag codes and
character formatting to Word styles and character formatting. This isn't a
trivial effort, but it's not terribly complicated.
One caution, though. I use both of these products extenively, and while I
like them both, I've found that Word is great for short to medium length
(50 pages max.) documents with relatively few graphics, but it's no Ventura
Publisher. You'll find that Word's performance suffers greatly when
documents get much longer than 50 pp.--scrolling is slow, and autosaves
(which I wouldn't dare turn off!) occur frequently and take forever.
Moreover, file sizes become enormous with just a few small graphics. You
might want to think twice about switching to Word exclusively if your
documents are long or graphics-intensive.
Take a look at the new version of Corel Ventura due to ship the end of next
month before you make a decision to abandon that product. If you decide you
still want a change, you might consider FrameMaker or Quark. But I don't
think Word is the solution unless your documents are short in length and
short on graphics.