Local comments on the ruling yesterday

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 04:46:14PM -0700, Mike Sheldon wrote:
> I don't see how MS had anything to do with Ventura Publisher's difficulties,
> since MS STILL doesn't have a competing product in that market (High-end
> document publishing software). Ventura's difficulties can be squarely placed
> on mishandling by it's owners. (I was a Ventura user once)

True enough.  VP was the first real DTP app I got my paws onto back in
the DOS days (1990ish).  It was slick and fast and I loved it, on my
XT with its monochrome graphics display.  Even supported my 24-pin printer
so that I could get near laser-quality output.  I did a couple of fairly
technical papers in it for a class or two; used AutoCAD to produce 
diagrams and VP could import the DXF's.  Its philosophy was to leave your
source material (text and pictures) alone, and still let you incorporate 
them into your document; so a document consisted of a directory full of the 
original source files necessary to compose the finished result.  There were 
import filters for just about every format known to man.  You could still 
edit the "embedded" stuff in whatever application created it in the first 
place, and the changes were transparent to the final document.  It even 
had the sort of "document processing" mentality of things like LyX (every 
text object had to be tagged with a style which specified what sort of thing 
it was, and how it was to be formatted; you were unable to just apply fonts 
to text willy-nilly) yet had the kind of powerful page layout that was 
possible in PageMaker.  It used the GEM GUI framework but didn't require 
a whole GEM installation...it just worked.  From a 360K diskette too.

Short of an open standard for "embedded" content like OpenDoc (which is
mostly dead these days), the compound document philosophy is IMO still
the best so far.

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