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I spent some years working in DTP for very big companies when I was still a teenager (this actually drove me to understand SGML, then HTML and I eventually beca

I spent some years working in DTP for very big companies when I was still a teenager (this actually drove me to understand SGML, then HTML and I eventually became a programmer, now software architect) and PageMaker was one of the tools I used the most, together with Interleaf, FrameMaker, Ventura, etc. Much of it was "let's see how can we make this English manual fit when translated to German using the same layout". Oh, boy, I'm so glad much of this is now irrelevant since much technical books are online. Still, it was interesting.

PopAlongKid 5y ago
I worked for a Fortune 200 company at the time, where there were frequent internal debates over which desktop software products to standardize on for corporate licensing and such. PageMaker and Ventura Publisher were the two leading contenders for desktop publishing. I personally strongly preferred Ventura Publisher, since having first done DTP using nroff/troff on Unix, it worked in a very similar way. You could work with the raw text and formatting tags used by Ventura in your favorite word processor and then open the file back up in Ventura. As the Wikipedia article states, Ventura made it almost automatic to have a high level of internal consistency in the document format, because, well, it worked like nroff. "It produced documents with a high degree of internal consistency, unless specifically overridden by the user. Its concepts of free-flowing text, paragraph tagging, and codes for attributes and special characters anticipated similar concepts inherent in HTML and XML. Likewise, its concept of "publication" files that tie together "chapter" files gave it the ability to handle documents hundreds (or even thousands) of pages in length as easily as a four-page newsletter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura

PopAlongKid 5y ago

I worked for a Fortune 200 company at the time, where there were frequent internal debates over which desktop software products to standardize on for corporate licensing and such. PageMaker and Ventura Publisher were the two leading contenders for desktop publishing. I personally strongly preferred Ventura Publisher, since having first done DTP using nroff/troff on Unix, it worked in a very similar way. You could work with the raw text and formatting tags used by Ventura in your favorite word processor and then open the file back up in Ventura. As the Wikipedia article states, Ventura made it almost automatic to have a high level of internal consistency in the document format, because, well, it worked like nroff. "It produced documents with a high degree of internal consistency, unless specifically overridden by the user. Its concepts of free-flowing text, paragraph tagging, and codes for attributes and special characters anticipated similar concepts inherent in HTML and XML. Likewise, its concept of "publication" files that tie together "chapter" files gave it the ability to handle documents hundreds (or even thousands) of pages in length as easily as a four-page newsletter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura