Ventura 10

Ventura has always been an excellent vehicle for designing large documents. If you have a book or lengthy report to produce, there's little that can compare with the document management provided by this program. More recently, though, Corel has added several ease-of-use features and improved graphics support by borrowing elements from CorelDRAW and Corel Photo-Paint. It has become an excellent general-purpose DTP program, aimed at business users.

Ventura 10 adds three key new features: XML import, table tags, and the ability to publish directly to PDF files. XML is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for text documents and this enhancement makes Ventura even more useful for creating pages intended for the Web.

Table tags work similarly to Ventura's paragraph tags, the program's way of handling styles. The new feature enables you to save the style of an entire table and apply it directly to other tables in the same or other documents. This can save a lot of time and help maintain a unified corporate style.

Ventura 10's ability to directly create Acrobat PDF files improves its ability to produce Internet documents quickly and easily. Among other new features and enhancements are 100 new effects you can apply directly to bitmap images, without using separate photo-enhancement software. There's a brand-new preflight engine, too, to reveal any problems with a document before it reaches printed proofs. A new wizard to help prepare for printing at a professional print shop works well with the preflight engine to prevent unexpected surprises.

The program is designed for Windows 2000 and XP only and comes with Database Publisher, the screen-capture utility Corel Capture, and a bar code tool. Over 1,500 TrueType and Type 1 fonts are bundled into the package. --Simon Williams, Amazon.co.uk