Ventura Publisher was the first popular desktop publishing package for IBM PC compatible computers. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small software company founded by John Meyer, 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, including WordPerfect, WordStar, and early versions of Microsoft Word, 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.

thumbnail|left|Xerox Ventura Publisher running on GEM

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.

The application was acquired by Corel in 1993. 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. 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 the Win32 platform and was released in 1996, labeled Corel Ventura 7 (instead of 6) so that it would match the version number of CorelDRAW. 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 via Wine (verified in April 2020).

As an application with strengths in more structured documents, its main competitors were FrameMaker, QuarkXPress and later InDesign.

Reception

Approving of its "general excellence", Ian McKinnell of Personal 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 over PageMaker 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".

"Ventura Publisher has suffered greatly since being acquired by Xerox", InfoWorld in 1993 said, having "not significantly changed in five years [and] just can't compete against either QuarkXPress or PageMaker". The magazine said that Ventura 4.1.1 was the best of the three for math and tabie editing, and hoped that Corel would improve the software. InfoWorld in 1995 said "Corel Ventura 5 addresses many of the old Ventura Publisher's limits [but] still needs work", with QuarkXPress still superior for high-end desktop publishing and PageMaker for businesses. The magazine thought that "Ventura could again be the top PC publishing program" if Corel continued fixing the software and improving its UI.

See also

  • QuarkXPress
  • Adobe FrameMaker
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Aldus PageMaker
  • Microsoft Publisher
  • Ready, Set, Go!
  • Scribus
  • Serif PagePlus
  • Quark CopyDesk
  • Quark Publishing System
  • Timeworks Publisher / Publish-It! / KeyPublisher, an inexpensive Ventura clone that ran under GEM on the PC or the Atari ST without requiring a hard drive
  • XTension

References

  • Desktop Publishing Using Ventura on the IBM-PC. Don Busché, Saddleback College, with Bernice Glenn, Desktop Publishing and Design Consultant. 1989 Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 07632. Paperback, 270 pages; includes monochromatic illustrations and 5 1/4" floppy data disk.
  • Ventura Publisher brochure