 Screenshot of Corel Ventura 10 | |
| Developer(s) | Alludo |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1986; 39 years ago (1986) |
| Final release | 10 / 2002; 23 years ago (2002) |
| Operating system | GEM,OS/2,Windows,Macintosh |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Desktop publishing |
| License | Commercialproprietary software |
| Website | https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/old-brands/corel-ventura/ |
Ventura Publisher was the first populardesktop publishing package forIBM PC compatible computers running theGEM extension to theDOS operating system. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small software company founded by Michael john Meyer,[1] Don Heiskell, and Lee Jay Lorenzen, all of whom met while working atDigital Research. It ran under an includedrun-time copy of Digital Research's GEM.[1]
The first version ofVentura Publisher was released in late 1986,[1][2][3] with worldwide distribution by Xerox. Xerox would later purchase all rights to the source code from Ventura Software in 1990.
Ventura Publisher had some text editing and line drawing capabilities of its own, but it was designed to interface with a wide variety of word processing and graphics programs rather than to supplant them. To that end, text was stored in, loaded from, and saved back to word processor files in the native formats of a variety of word processors, includingWordPerfect,WordStar, and early versions ofMicrosoft Word,[4] rather than being incorporated into the chapter files. This allowed users to continue using their favorite word processors for major text changes, spelling checks, and so forth.[3] Paragraphs other than default body text were tagged with descriptive tagnames that were entirely user-defined, and characters and attributes that have no native equivalent in a given word processor were represented with standardized sequences of characters. When working with the files outside of Ventura Publisher, these paragraph tags and special character and attribute codes could be freely changed, the same as any other text. These tags looked very much like HTML tags.
Ventura Publisher was the first major typesetting program to incorporate the concept of an implicit "underlying page" frame, and one of the first to incorporate a strong "style sheet" concept. It produced documents with a high degree of internal consistency, unless specifically overridden by the user. Its concepts of free-flowing text, paragraph tagging, and codes for attributes and special characters anticipated similar concepts inherent inHTML andXML. Likewise, its concept of "publication" files that tie together "chapter" files gave it the ability to handle documents hundreds (or even thousands) of pages in length as easily as a four-page newsletter.
The major strengths of the original DOS/GEM edition of Ventura Publisher were:
The original Ventura Software ceased operations in February 1990, and a new Ventura Software Inc. was formed at that time, an affiliated company ofXerox. The developers from the original company worked with the new Xerox Ventura Software company to produce Version 3.0 Gold. This was released in late 1990. Besides DOS/GEM, it was also available forWin16,Mac, andOS/2.[8][9]
The three founders of the original Ventura Software no longer worked on the product after November 1990.
Version 4.0 was released in 1991. The last version released by Ventura Software Inc. was 4.1.1 in 1993.[10]
The application was acquired byCorel in 1993.[10] It was repackaged and soon released asCorel Ventura 4.2 without any major change in the application,[11] other than to drop all support for platforms other than Microsoft Windows.
The first real Corel version was 5.0 (released in 1994), which made fundamental changes to both user interface and document structure.[12] Because of this, and because of escalating hardware requirements of the various Corel versions, the original DOS/GEM edition still has a small number of die-hard users.
The application was rewritten for theWin32 platform and was released in 1996, labeled Corel Ventura 7 (instead of 6) so that it would match the version number ofCorelDRAW. Corel Ventura 8 was released in 1998. The last published version was Corel Ventura 10 in 2002 (last updated in February 2003); it reportedly runs in Windows 10 under compatibility mode with some functional limitations after workarounds, and on Linux viaWine (verified in April 2020).
As an application with strengths in more structured documents, its main competitors wereFrameMaker,QuarkXPress and laterInDesign.
Approving of its "general excellence", Ian McKinnell ofPersonal Computer World wrote in January 1987 that Ventura Publisher for GEM was immediately usable with his Macintosh experience, and cited the macro feature as "a real improvement overPagemaker on the Macintosh". He concluded that while it would not cause new users to buy a PC, for existing owners "Ventura Publisher is well worth investigating".[13]
