Ventura Publisher was the first popular
desktop publishingDesktop publishing combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local multifunction peripheral output and distribution....
package for
IBM PCThe IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
compatible computers running
DOSDOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is a shorthand term for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions Windows 95, 98, and ME.Related systems...
Disk Operating System. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small company founded by John Meyer (who developed it when he was at Xerox PARC), Don Heiskel and Lee Jay Lorenzen. It ran under an included run-time copy of
Digital Research, Inc.Digital Research, Inc. was the company created by Dr. Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related products. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world. Digital Research should not be confused with Digital Equipment Corporation; the two were not...
's
Graphical Environment ManagerGEM is a windowing system created by Digital Research, Inc. for use with the CP/M operating system on the Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors...
(GEM) Desktop. The first version was released in 1986.
Ventura was distributed by several companies, but after a while Xerox became the only distributor and in 1989 they even bought the source code.
Ventura Publisher was the first popular
desktop publishingDesktop publishing combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local multifunction peripheral output and distribution....
package for
IBM PCThe IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
compatible computers running
DOSDOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is a shorthand term for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions Windows 95, 98, and ME.Related systems...
Disk Operating System. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small company founded by John Meyer (who developed it when he was at Xerox PARC), Don Heiskel and Lee Jay Lorenzen. It ran under an included run-time copy of
Digital Research, Inc.Digital Research, Inc. was the company created by Dr. Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related products. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world. Digital Research should not be confused with Digital Equipment Corporation; the two were not...
's
Graphical Environment ManagerGEM is a windowing system created by Digital Research, Inc. for use with the CP/M operating system on the Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors...
(GEM) Desktop. The first version was released in 1986.
Ventura was distributed by several companies, but after a while Xerox became the only distributor and in 1989 they even bought the source code. Ventura Software Inc., an affiliated company of
XeroxXerox Corporation is a fortune 500 global document management company which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
, was formed and version 3.0 Gold was published in 1990. Besides DOS/GEM it was also available for Win16, Mac and
OS/2OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...
. Version 4.0 was released in 1991. The last version released by Ventura Software Inc. was 4.1.1 in 1993.
Ventura Publisher, while it has some text editing and line drawing capabilities of its own, was designed to interface with a wide variety of word processing and graphics programs, rather than supplant them. To that end, text, rather than being incorporated into the chapter files, is stored in, loaded from, and saved back to, word processor files in the native formats of a variety of word processors, including
WordPerfectWordPerfect is a proprietary word processing application, now owned by Corel. Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer...
,
WordstarWordStar was a word processor application, published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early to mid-1980s. Although Seymour I...
, and early versions of Microsoft Word. This allows users to continue using their favorite word processors for major text changes, spelling checks, and so forth. Paragraphs other than default body text are tagged with descriptive tagnames that are entirely user-defined, and characters and attributes that have no native equivalent in a given word processor are represented with standardized sequences of characters. When working with the files outside of Ventura Publisher, these paragraph tags and special character and attribute codes can be freely changed, the same as any other text.
Because it 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, Ventura Publisher produces 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 in
HTMLHTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images...
and
XMLXML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the produced by the W3C and several other related specifications; all are fee-free open standards....
. 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 Ventura Publisher, at least in its original DOS/GEM edition, are its ability to run, with reasonable response times, on a wide range of hardware (including DOS-only machines that could not even begin to run Windows), its ability to produce, by default, documents with a high degree of internal consistency, and its automatic re-export of text to word-processor-native formats. It also had the ability to print to a wide variety of devices, including
PostScriptPostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas....
, PCL, and
InterPressInterPress is a page description language developed at Xerox PARC, based on the Forth programming language and an earlier graphics language called JaM...
laser printers and imagesetters, as well as certain popular dot-matrix printers.
The application was acquired by
CorelCorel Corporation is a Canadian computer software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is known for producing famous software titles such as CorelDRAW and WordPerfect.- History :...
in 1993. It was repackaged and soon released as Corel Ventura 4.2 without any major change in the application, other than to drop all support for platforms other than Microsoft Windows. The first real Corel version was 5.0, released in 1994, and made fundamental changes to both user interface and document structure. Because of this, and because of escalating 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 the Win32 platform and was released in 1996, labeled Corel Ventura 7 (instead of 6) so that it would match the version number of
CorelDRAWCorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. It is also the name of Corel's Graphics Suite...
.
Corel Ventura 8 was released in 1998. The next and (as of Sep 2009) latest version is Corel Ventura 10. As an application with strengths in more structured documents, its main competitor is
AdobeAdobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. The company has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more-recent foray towards rich Internet application software...
FrameMakerAdobe FrameMaker is a desktop publishing and word processing application that is popular for large documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems...
.
See also
- Timeworks Publisher
Timeworks Publisher was a desktop publishing program produced by GST Software in the United Kingdom.It is notable as the first affordable DTP program. In appearance and operation, it was a Ventura Publisher clone, but it was possible to run it on a computer without a hard disk...
, this was a Ventura clone for the PC and Atari STThe Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was commercially available from 1985 to the early 1990s. It was released by Atari Corporation in 1985...
.
- Ventura printers from Granada
Granada is a city and the capital of the province of Granada, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain.- Overview :The city of Granada is placed at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the confluence of three rivers, Beiro, Darro and Genil, at an elevation of 738 metres above sea...
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External links