Corel Ventura 5.0

["George F. Hayhoe III" <george -dot- hayhoe -at- SRS -dot- GOV>]

Bob Armao's questions about Corel Ventura 5.0 are good ones. Unfortunately,
I can't offer any definitive answers, but I can make some educated hunches.
(Although I had beta-tested all the earlier Windows and OS/2 releases for
Xerox/Ventura Software, Corel didn't invite me--or most of the other
experienced users and field testers--to test the new one, and instead
relied on their existing Corel Draw testers, many of whom had limited
experience with Ventura. Big mistake in my book, and maybe the reason why
the product's release has been delayed four times.)

At any rate, chapters created with an earlier version of Ventura *should*
open fine in version 5, but Corel is warning against any expectation of
backward compatibility, due to the departure of such elements as width
tables (.WID) and chapter files (.CIF). This has been true of earlier
versions as well, though there have been utilities that allowed conversion
of a version 4 chapter to version 3 format. I wouldn't count on any such
utilities this time, though, at least not anytime soon, since the
conversion involved would be considerably more complex.

I also wouldn't trash any .WID or .CIF files associated with existing
Ventura chapters until you've actually opened those chapters with version
5. The information they contain may be needed by version 5.

Finally, I don't expect that the Word to Ventura filter will do more than
convert Word styles to Ventura tags and vice versa. With luck, tables may
also convert back and forth, but I doubt that indexing information will be
converted.

--George Hayhoe
  Assistant to the President for Recognition Programs, STC