Ventura 5.0

Ventura 5.0 is the first really major upgrade to this long-established product in a long time. It’s also the first version of Ventura to be developed by Corel which has introduced some major improvements into a program that seemed to be heading for oblivion just a year ago. Many of Ventura’s improvements are long overdue.
Existing users of Ventura will be dancing in the streets when they hear that there are now NO WIDTH TABLES! For those of you who have been spared from dealing with earlier versions, this won’t mean much, but Ventura now reads font information directly from WIN.INI, just like a well-behaved Windows application should.
Previous versions forced you to create a named tag for every minor change to a style, but you can now override all the paragraph settings (fonts, alignment, spacing, breaks, and so on) for any paragraph without affecting any others. Another long overdue improvement is that text can now be wrapped around an irregularly shaped graphic; a feature rival PageMaker has had for some years, but which could previously only be achieved manually in Ventura. Now you can define a text wrap using editable bezier curves, which I found allowed simpler, more precise wrapping than even PageMaker possesses. Ventura 5 also sports a new and extremely well-designed interface.
Many of the tools are now identical to those in sister product CorelDRAW 5.0, and Draw users will find tasks such as defining fills (including fractal special effects, bitmap patterns and graduated fills) in Ventura very familiar. Dialog boxes have been re-designed so that related functions are grouped into a single dialog with ‘thumb tabs’ along the top. You can switch from changing fonts to altering paragraph spacing with a single click, instead of having to go back to the menu. The ‘Update tags’ dialogue is identical to the paragraph dialogue, but offers the additional function of editing all the tags in a style sheet without leaving the dialog.
Like CorelDRAW, Ventura makes extensive use of roll-up dialogs, so that those you need often can be left open without covering over your screen. Other features shared with Draw include the ability to import CorelDRAW files in their native CDR format, and access to various CorelDRAW add-ons — such as Mosaic, CorelKern, TypeAssist and CorelQuery — from within Ventura.
This new version has a series of very exciting improvements to what is still the best long-document tool on the market.