Desktop Publishing Contents: -----Desktop Publishing Programs -----Ventura Tools -----General Tools ================================ -----Desktop Publishing Programs [ENVISION] EnVision Publisher 1.54 (Software Vision Corporation ASP; $74) is a full-featured, WYSIWYG desktop publishing program. First let's get the negatives out of the way so that we can get on with the praise the program richly deserves. The manual claims that the program is better than programs costing 10 times more (ie: $700) and challenges the user to compare. In response to that, we have to say that EnVision Publisher (EVP) is not remotely close to being in the same league with programs like Framemaker, Ventura Publisher, or PageMaker, all of which have street prices well under $700. The more expensive programs support a wide variety of graphics and word processing formats, have many features for fine-tuning text position (eg: space between letters, feathering), better support for long documents, and so on. A more reasonable comparison would be to PFS:First Publisher and Publish-It!, two retail-only DTP programs with street prices under $100. EVP has some features that are better than these programs, but the reverse is also true. Now for the good points - the program's interface is beautiful. The tool bar is handy, allowing you to make text bold and italicized at the click of a button, along with many other functions. The method of entering text and graphics is easy. (The whole program is very easy to use.) Text can be rotated. Lines, boxes, circles can be easily drawn, resized, reshaped, colored, and filled. Portrait and landscape orientation and custom page sizes are supported. Sophisticated features include style sheets, master pages, four page-magnification levels, and support for a wide variety of printers, including dot matrix printers, HPLJ's, PostScript, and color Paintjets. It will also print multiple copies, collate, scale the printout, and print to disk. Aside from the limited graphics importing support, we would easily rate EVP ahead of the low-cost retail-only DTP programs. Certainly, there is nothing in shareware (for DOS) to compare to it. Requires 450K RAM and 2.5MB of disk space. [TYPSETPC] Typesetter PC (Dorfman, Len & Young, Dennis; $30) is a true WYSIWYG shareware desktop publishing program for Epson compatible printers. It offers multiple fonts and graphics capabilities. It can be used to create things like labels and business cards in addition to standard DTP output. It automatically processes images to smooth out curves, increase resolution, and rescale the image. -----Ventura Tools [ARCVPCH] ArcVpChp (White, Bob; $0) creates an archive containing all the files referenced in a CHP chapter file. It can optionally include the width file referenced in the STY style sheet, and also make the archive into a self-extracting archive. [BORDERS] Borders ($0) is a collection of 24 borders in GEM format for use in Ventura. [CLIPART] ClipArt (Wright, Joel; $0) is a set clip art in IMG format for use with VP. [DECODER] Decoder! 1.2 (Trinity Communications ASP; $39) strips tags and bracket codes from Ventura Publisher text files. It is extremely fast, processing a 35k file in a few seconds. However, it choked on a 95k file with a huge number of tags in it. Rarely, if ever, are you likely to have a file with the number of tags that our large test file had, so we do not consider this a significant bug. [DINGBAT] Dingbat ($0) are the screen fonts for Adobe Dingbat printer fonts. [DROPCAP] DropCap (ProGraf; $20) offers a number of resident graphics ornaments for Ventura Publisher. [FILER] Filer! (Trinity Communications ASP; $79) is a powerful menu-driven file management utility for Ventura Publisher. When you start it up, it automatically scans your hard disk for VP files. One window of the display lists the PUBs and CHPs. As you scroll down the list, the related files are shown in a second window and the contents of a selected file are displayed in the third windows. From this screen, pull-down menus let you copy, move, archive, backup, compress and decompress any combination of Ventura chapters and/or publications. Other features include expanded memory support, context sensitive help, file finding and sorting operations, a file information display, automatic updating of all internal chapter and publication references, and much more. A Ventura Load option lets you select a chapter and load Ventura with that chapter active. PKZIP in included in this package for compression work, but must be registered separately. [FIXVP] FixVP (Ross, James F.; $0) will rewrite files which contain Ventura tags and codes to a new file in the following manner: (1) All tag statements (@tag= ) at the beginnings of lines are deleted. (2) Ventura codes, i. e., material between angle brackets such as <169>, are rewritten to equivalents. [FREZIT] Frezit (Scudder Publications; $40) is a utility program designed to backup and restore Ventura Publishers file on floppy disk. The program is designed to process all files relating to a given chapter or publication, including Ventura Publisher generated files. Once the files are archived, FREZIT will optionally erase the files from hard disk, making available valuable hard disk space. [GROOMER] VP FILE GROOMER (Donnelly, Peter; $25) aids in fixing up files for Ventura. It can assign style tags, strip redundant spaces and tabs, change font attributes, convert single and double hyphens to em and en dashes or bullet tags, and much more all in a single pass. [HEIDELB] Heidelb 1.0 (Published Perfection!; $20) is a fully functional PostScript font for Ventura Publisher and Windows and PageMaker users with the MGX PostScript Driver. The font can also be used in Corel Draw. It is a calligraphic font well suited for certificates, awards, and diplomas. This is by the same creator as the Diego1 font. [HPSLASH] HPSlash (Alchemy Mindworks, Inc.; $5) reduces the size of Ventura font files by removing the upper-ASCII characters. [INDEX] Index! 2.0 (Trinity Communications ASP; $79) is a powerful automatic indexing utility for Ventura Publisher. This menu driven program lets you enter terms to index in a database, then searches up to 100 chapters at a time. It then builds and inserts the index codes Ventura needs. Other features include index preview options, automatic file selection, an index code stripper, DOS shell, editable help screens, and more. If you have ever had to build an index for a major product in Ventura, you will recognize that this program will pay for itself the first time you use it. [PRO_CR] PRO-CR (Gray, David ASP; $42) is an optical character recognition program. Input to the program can be provided directly from an HP ScanJet or from a TIFF file produced by any other scanner. It recognizes both mono-spaced and proportionally spaced fonts and adjusts automatically to character size from 8 to 30 point. Additional features include preview and on-line correction functions, support for 200 dpi, compressed TIFFs and PCX files. The program can be trained to learn unrecognized shapes or new fonts if you have EGA or VGA; otherwise, a graphics card is not required. It reads at a speed of up to 200 words per minute. [PUB_UTIL] Publisher's Desktop Utilities #1 (Hecht, Joe C.; $39) is a set of utilities for desktop publishers. TAB converts spaces to tabs. NEWLINE converts ASCII files to retain their true line and paragraph endings. STRIPSPACE strips excessive spaces from an ASCII file. VP-DEL allows you to delete Ventura chapters fast. PS-PRN allows you to print an ASCII file to your PostScript printer. BACKIT will split large files onto multiple disks. [ROUNDUP] VP ROUNDUP (Donnelly, Peter; $25) is an easy-to-use stylesheet and chapter-management utility with many powerful features. [SWAP] SWAP! 1.5 (Trinity Communications, ASP; $49) is a TSR that creates a DOS shell for the Gem version of Ventura Publisher. It allows you to use a hot key to jump to DOS from Ventura, run any program, and return. The program swaps Ventura to expanded or extended memory or disk. [TAG] Tag! (Trinity Communications ASP; $59) makes it easy to add Ventura tags to documents. Formats supported are ASCII, MS Word and WordPerfect. This menu-driven program has many shortcuts for quickly and easily tagging files, including hot keys and mouse point-and-click. [TYPE_STU] Type Studio (Hecht, Joe C.; $39) is a font generator for Ventura Publisher when installed for PostScript Printers. It will allow you to create an endless supply of new and unique typefaces. You can expand type to fill a white space, save printing dollars with condensed type, outline faces with variable stroke widths, shade characters to any gray percentage, fill characters with a graduated screen, rotate both baselines and character origins, tilt, skew, slant or backslant, stroke characters with up to two shades, apply up to six levels of drop shadow characters, choice of generating screen fonts and automatically generate italic, bold and bold italics. [PS_PREP] PS Prep (Narup, Tripp; $0) is a set of files containing tips about and examples of modifying the Ventura printer prep file. Among the powers this gives you is the ability to define how characters should print. As Narup says: "You want Polish? You got Polish accents." [TAGGER] Tagger 1.1 (Atmospheres; $0) lets you easily and quickly tag a database file for Ventura Publisher. While it is possible to export data from a database in a format that is readily acceptable to Ventura Publisher, it requires creating and testing a label or report format file first before finally creating the tagged file. A time consuming process. With TAGGER, you simply export the database to a delimited ASCII file. You then start up Tagger and let it parse out the records and fields of data and tag them. The resulting file is ready to load into Ventura Publisher as a pre-tagged ASCII file. Tagging each field by hand in Ventura Publisher is not required. [VCOPYPN] VCopy 2.0 (Navarro, Pedro; $0) will copy all the files in a chapter to a specified directory or disk, updating the chapter references; like Ventura's own Copy Chapter command. [VEN_FK] Ven_FK (Ostroff, Mark; $0) is a set of several Ventura Publisher 2.0 files for creating function key templates. [VPSCREE] Ventura Screen Font Editor (Teach Services; $20-$45) lets you modify your existing screen fonts for customized characters and diacritical markings. It includes convenient full directory pathway control. The program supports font sizes from 3 to 36 points. The program also uses the high-resolution EGA graphics-text display mode. [VP_CHAR] VP_Char (Ramsey, H. Rudy; $0) file contains a table partially detailing Ventura Publisher's mapping of Extended-ASCII characters. [VPRULER] VPRuler (Burns, Andrew; $0) is an .EPS file that prints a page full of measuring sticks for all the units of measure relevant to Ventura. It must be printed on a Postscript printer (or with PS emulation software) and works best when printed on a clear sheet of acetate. -----General Tools [AQ31] AlphaQuote 3.1 (Alphabtyes, Incorporated ASP; $29) is for budgeting or billing typesetting and desktop publishing projects. It provides an easy to use menu interface with on-line context sensitive help. It also features a graphic arts calculator, instant screen preview, report writer for printed estimates, hourly rates generator for DTP and complete documentation in a printer-ready format. [CALPUB] Calendar Publisher (Ahlo, Keoni; $15) allows you to easily create individual month calendars with Corel Draw. [CTOC41] Code To Code 4.1 (Alphabtyes, Incorporated ASP; $29) is a collection of programs for working with files containing typesetting codes. Such codes are inserted by DTP programs like Ventura. Code To Code can strip out all of the codes and optionally re-insert them later, under certain conditions. It can also split large files into small files with user- controlled break points. Codes can be automatically translated from typesetting to DTP or DTP to typesetting in addition to code stripping and code-free editing. In our testing, it removed all the Ventura control codes from our PsL News file so quickly that we didn't realize it had done its work already. Being able to strip DTP control codes from a file so quickly makes it more convenient to create plain on-disk documentation files and to clean up a file for spelling, style and grammar checking programs. The conversion ability makes it easy to move between DTP and typesetting formats. [GREEKER] Greeker (Cambell, George; $0) creates ASCII text files in Latinate nonsense text to any length you specify. The purpose is for creating dummy files for desktop publishing or word processor layouts. Files of any length may be created. [NEWS_KIT] Newsletter Kit (WordSmith; $32) is a series of templates and style sheets for users of Ventura Publisher. There are eight designs to cover most popular newsletter styles. Even if you do not use the templates provided, you can learn quite a bit by studying the tricks used in them. We highly recommend this set for Ventura users. [OKSCR000] OKSCR000 (Graham, Keith P.; $0) will capture screens to PCX files. Almost all screen types can be captured, but the output is in black and white only. [REALTYPE] RealType ($0) is a patch for Corel Draw's INI file that causes the font names to be displayed in Corel as the names of the fonts they emulate. For example, what Corel calls Toronto is really Times. [WIDMAN] VP Width Manager (Peter Donnelly; $25) provides a simple, menu-driven interface that enables you to delete, reorder, and rename fonts in a width table, and more.