Corel Ventura

~ the obit ~

ventura was for people who made books for a living. i was not one of those, and i was two years old when it shipped.

the name i knew out of this company was coreldraw, which sat on the machines in turkish print shops for twenty years. corel owned ventura for nine of its sixteen years and i never once heard the word said out loud. that is the ordinary fate of professional software. enormous inside one trade, invisible one step outside it.

ventura software was founded by three engineers out of digital research, among them lee jay lorenzen and john meyer. their program came out at the end of 1986 with xerox handling worldwide distribution, and it did something no other pc program of the moment could do. it laid out long documents. not a flyer, a book, with chapters and an index that renumbered itself when you moved a section.

there was a problem sitting underneath that. the ibm pc in 1986 had no graphical interface to build on, so ventura brought one along. a runtime copy of digital research's gem came in the box and started up under the program, which is why ventura looked like nothing else on dos and why using it felt like being on a different computer for as long as it was open. the founders had come from the company that made gem, so this was less a workaround than a decision.

i met page layout from the far end of this history, on machines where the window system was already there and the question of whether a pc could do typesetting had been closed for a decade. ventura is the program that closed it, on hardware that had no business winning that fight.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the three owners ~

xerox distributed it from the start and bought all rights to the source code in 1990. a xerox-owned ventura software inc. then put out version 3.0 gold at the end of that year. version 4.0 followed in 1991 and 4.1.1 in 1993, the last release with xerox behind it. corel bought the product the same year and shipped corel ventura 4.2 almost immediately.

corel ventura 5.0 in 1994 rebuilt enough of the program that long-time users treated it as a different product wearing the old name. version 7 moved to win32 in 1996 and version 8 followed in 1998. then it went quiet for four years.

~ the last version ~

corel ventura 10 shipped in october 2002. it was a 250 megabyte install with a preflight engine and native pdf output that needed no separate distiller, and corel put fifteen hundred fonts in the box with it. the pitch had shifted by then. half of it was aimed at enterprises with xml content they needed to pour into print, which is a real market, but it is not the market that made ventura's name.

reviewers at the time liked it and noted what was not there. no opentype support in 2002. no compatibility with the windows input method editors, so it could not set japanese. the volume had gone to quarkxpress and pagemaker years before, and indesign was two years old and taking what was left of those.

there was no discontinuation notice. the last update to version 10 is dated february 2003. corel never shipped an eleven. the useful parts moved into coreldraw, and the corel site now treats ventura as an old brand name that redirects you to a trial of something else.

~ what it was right about ~

ventura's whole existence is an argument about where a document lives. it treated a document as a structure with styles attached to it, much closer to how xml and css work now than to anything its competitors were doing then. quarkxpress and pagemaker won by treating a page as a canvas you place things on, which is easier to sell and much easier to demonstrate in a shop.

the structural approach came back and won later, on the web, under other names and without ventura's on it anywhere.

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