Ventura Vs Indesign Vs Pagemaker
Basheer Noorgat
Hi,
I'm a coreldraw user for many users.
I have a need for a program to assist in Book/Booklet publishing.
Some of the requirements
- Good table support
- Support for Right to left Languages
- Database publishing
Which is the best option? (Ventura 10, Indesign or Pagemaker?)
Is Corel still supporting Ventura strongly? In South Africa, I have yet to
come across anyone in the print industry using Ventura. Adobe products seem
to rule for whatever reason...
What products will qualify one for the Ventura 10 upgrade?
Regards
Basheer
South Africa
Carol Lovelady
Ventura and InDesign both would be good candidates for your publication.
Ventura is very strong in book publishing and has many nice features that
InDesign doesn't have for this type of application.
Both can handle tables quite well. Ventura has a feature for putting a
caption area on a frame, something no other program has. This is quite handy
if you have graphics that need a caption or label.
Database Publisher is a utility program included with Ventura. You'll have
to purchase an add-on for this if you use InDesign. In fact, you'll probably
have to purchase quite a few add-ons when using InDesign. Ventura has
everything you need right in the box.
You can't purchase PageMaker any longer, so don't even consider it. And,
while Ventura isn't used by any printer, don't worry about that. You need to
make PDF files to give to them and it doesn't matter what program you use,
as long as you create a PDF with the proper specs (which you can get from
your printer and excellent advice from this newsgroup).
--
Carol Lovelady
Lovelady Consulting (training, consulting, production)
loveladyconsulting.com
Ventura User Exchange (worldwide user group) venturalady.com
"Basheer Noorgat" <-b...@nmcexquisite.com> wrote in message
news:41a2e672_1@cnews...
Abe Hendin
Basheer Noorgat wrote:
> Some of the requirements
> - Good table support
> - Support for Right to left Languages
> - Database publishing
>
> Which is the best option? (Ventura 10, Indesign or Pagemaker?)
Welcome, Basheer. Ventura is good for tables and dbase publishing, but
does not do right-to-left or Unicode. If you need true right-to-left
support, you need either Indesign ME or PageMaker ME (ME= middle eastern
edition, somewhat more expensive than the standard English editions.
This place seems to have decent prices:
http://www.fontworld.com/arabic/indesignme.html
Better to go with ID, for sure--PM is lame and dead, ID is growing.
That said, I haven't tried it to see how it handles things, particularly
vocalization, if that is required. I do set a lot of Hebrew in Ventura,
by various tricks. But I do the Hebrew for academic mss that quote
ancient texts, so there isn't much correction that would require reflow,
so once I get it converted for Ventura it's pretty much set. Here's a
sample page from a current project:
http://yourspeed.com/dnl/HebrewSampleV10.pdf
Source files were in Nisus format (Mac). I used Ksharim to convert it to
Word, which preserved the right-to-left format of the Hebrew--rather
impressive. Then set the Hebrew materials in Word to the same column
width and font/size as they would be in Ventura, and ran a home-grown
macro to convert the Hebrew to left-to-right for Ventura and my own
custom version of the Hebrew font. I had to change the encoding to put
the characters within the ANSI set, and create appropriate vowel
positions for the various character widths to avoid massive kerning and
huge headaches. The font was a lot of work, and NOT for the faint of
heart. Of course it didn't help that the vendor was sloppy in creating it.
Upshot: the conversion of right-to-left for software that's incapable of
right-to-left text processing requires significant technical skill and
knowledge of the right-to-left language to ensure appropriate line
breaks. You would be much better off with ID for this purpose, as it
would retain the text flow AND support Unicode fonts. This should
greatly reduce the technical issues.
Now, if you have to set only a few right-to-left words, Ventura might be
OK if you can get fonts that have ANSI encoding. You'd then have access
to all the power that Ventura offers.
--
Abe Hendin
AtYourSpeed Consulting
http://yourspeed.com
Ventura scripts: http://yourspeed.com/vscripts.html
Ventura automation help: http://yourspeed.com/vscripthelp.html
Dave L
....
> You can't purchase PageMaker any longer, so don't even consider it.
This is not so. Adobe sell it and so do resellers.
Dave