Ventura Publisher

[Bob Nelson <rl...@yahoo.com>]

I don't have a lot of experience with Writer yet.  But what I HOPE is that the Styles capability gives
Writer the same capabilities as the old Ventura Publisher (VP).  VP is gone now, I believe buried by
Corel who bought it from Xerox.  But I wrote a number of complex user manuals with it back in the 

1970s and 1980s (not exactly sure of the dates).  In fact I came to know the original authors and served 

as one of their beta testers for a time.  I liked VP a whole lot, and miss it very much.  It made stylized document
development very easy.  IMHO far better than any of the newer desktop publisher programs.  


VP was aimed at generating an entire document - not just micro-formatting a single page.  The basic idea
was that you defined (with easy key-clicks) all the formatting details for a particular "paragraph" type, and then
gave that paragraph type a name.  Then every other paragraph you wanted could be tagged with the same name,
and it would take on all the same formatting.  Typically I had names like heading, subheading, subsubheading, 

document title, chapter title, etc etc.  I think you understand.  So after you typed in a document's text, you just went
from paragraph (or heading) to paragraph, and tagged each one to format it.  Quick and easy way to a professional
looking document.


If Writer has "styles" that operate this way, I hope that capability makes it much like VP.  

Anyone have any thoughts along these lines?

Bob Nelson




>________________________________
> From: Rory O'Farrell <of...@iol.ie>
>To: users@openoffice.apache.org 
>Cc: Eric Fenster <er...@yahoo.com> 
>Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2013 10:06 AM
>Subject: Re: reveal codes
> 
>On Sun, 20 Jan 2013 07:42:46 -0800 (PST)
>Eric Fenster <er...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> What chance Open Office will offer "reveal codes" à la Word Perfect?
>> 
>> This is the reason I keep my old Word Perfect program, as crash-prone as it is. The feature really helps control formatting.
>> 
>Consistent use of styles should obviate the need for this.  Also useful is /View /Nonprinting characters, to reveal spaces, tabs and line or paragraph breaks.
>-- 
>Rory O'Farrell <of...@iol.ie>
>
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