general

We waited a long time for Corel to produce VPXML and when the did they called it Corel Ventura 10. A bit unadventurous ? In more ways than one.

First major change is that Ventura will now run only on Win2K or XP (and presumably the successors). Corel reason that instability was on of VP's bubears and have addressed this by running only on stable platforms. It seems to wrk. it has not crashed on me in 2 months.

The second big change is the ability to import XML. Lets make that clear. This is not an XML editor. It will import, format and paginate xml files. But they cannot be edited in situ. They are linked back to the original xml file which can be edited and VP will display any changes to the source xml.

The XML facilities have been bolted on to VP. A new utility called the Mapping Editor allows users to map xml structures to VP tags including paragraphs, inline formats, page styles, tables, frames, rows and cells. Ther map is stored as an xml file with a .vmf (Ventura Map Format ?) extension.

When an xml file is imported, a vmf file must be allocated to the import so that VP knows how to format the xml. A VMF can have an XSLT transformation attached to it so that the original xml can be restructured BEFORE VP sees it, again without affecting the source XML.

If this sounds complicated, well XML can be complicated. And to use the XML facilites to their best you need to understand XML itself.

The third major change is the addition of table tags. Know a standard table style can be allocated a name and reused accross a publication.

This is a very good start and for me the use of xml is key.

It works. But it needs a few more facilities to be top notch.

Score 4/5

Ventura has always offered more features per dollar than its rival desktop publishing programs (some experts who use them all estimate it would cost $10,000 in add-ins for Quark Express to have all the features included with Ventura). I've tried some of the others, but none really can match the ease of use and power of Ventura 8, and now Ventura 10. Ventura is simply the best for publishing books, newsletters, magazines, brochures, flyers, and catalogs.

New to Version 10 is a great "Publish to PDF" feature that turns your Ventura documents into letter perfect PDF files with a few clicks of the mouse. Ventura's modeless cursor really speeds up production as does its built-in Database Publisher which enabled us to produce over 300 fully formated pages of our book "International Job Finder" in an afternoon -- including two extensive indexes! The Navigator makes it easy to change the order of chapters in a document and easily track down index entries, markers, and cross references.

I won't pretend Ventura 10 is perfect -- it was designed to run only in Windows XP and 2000. But it is very stable; bugs are no worse than what its competition offer. Since I started using version 8 several years ago, I have not had to call Tech Support even once. There's an incredible newgroup of Ventura users (at cnews.corel.ca, under corel.graphic_apps) around the world who can quickly -- and accurately -- answer any question you proffer.