Xerox Ventura Publisher 2.0

History of the product

See Wiki for this history of this DOS-based Desktop Publishing software which cost about $795. Version 2.0 dates from about 1989. The GUI is provided by GEM, Digital Research's shell which runs on top of DOS. The GEM runtime is part of the Ventura 2 package.

Issues with using XVP2 in 2007

In 2007, you can still use Ventura Publisher 2.0! There are caveats.

• Windows 2000 and up has hiccups running XVP2. You get error messages frequently, sometimes two in a row, sometimes four in a row. Just click the OK box and continue. I have not discovered any problems with the output, except a delay. Solution: use Win9x. Use OS/2. Use DOS. I haven't investigated whether a virtual machine DOS will work.
• Printers I. AFAIK, there are no drivers for printers beyond 300 dpi. Fine for text, not so great for images and graphics. The drivers are written for the printer's native page composition language. For example, the HP LJ II driver is written for the version of PCL (HP's page composition language) which comes with the LJ II. If you in fact use a more advanced printer, such as the HP Colour LJ 2605dn, you only get the features of PCL 3? whereas the colour printer supports PCL 5? and 6?. The solution would be to find a driver for a printer which supports a more advanced PCL version. I haven't run across any. If you go to the HP site, for example, it does not have pre-Win95 Ventura drivers for older printers. For example, for the LJ 4, it has drivers for MS Works, MS Word, WP, Harvard Graphics and Lotus 123.
• Printers II. XVP2 recognizes only parallel and serial ports. Solution: print to file. Then you can use PrintFile to print that on any Windows-attached printer, even an ethernet network printer. Also, if you don't want to "waste" paper, you can see a pretty accurate screen representation of that page with PCLReader a useful free demoware version of a commercial product. So in some ways this makes the problem of modern printers an advantage. And since modern printers print at 600 dpi or better, and have optimization technology, there's a good chance that your copy will look better on a modern printer.
• Printers III. Not all printers will work. For example the popular cheap HP LJ 1018 is a host-based printer. It does not have the internal smarts to figure out PCL. So you send a .PCL (or .C00) file to the 1018 via PrintFile, and nothing happens. Older LaserJets, some older Brother printers, and many more expensive contemporary printers will understand.
• Monitor. Ventura comes with a driver for your monitor. The common monitor driver SDFVGAH5.VGA runs fine with a 1024x768 VGA card, or with an IBM Thinkpad 600X, for example. However, this driver switches the computer into a different mode and pretty much makes it shut down so far as multitasking or the network is concerned. And it also does not use the full screen resolution. I've tried a purported 1024x768 Ventura monitor driver, but it crashes the application. I'm not sure if the driver is written for a particular graphics card, or if the ATI Mach64 is the problem. So while the display of elements on the page is OK, it's kind of a blocky WYSIWYG.

Good things about using XVP2 today

• It's blazingly fast. On a 133 MHz Pentium 1 machine with 32 MB of RAM (which is NOT a modern machine for 2007, it's about 10 years out of date), a 320 page book loads in about 4 seconds.
• You can publish documents in PDF, with additional software costing less than $100! As outlined above, you can test out PCLReader. The commercial, pay-for version of that product, PCLWorks. Note that you can find out about PCLWorks from the PCLReader website, but you can't order it from there, even though they are all the same company, PageTech. To order PCLWorks, go to the PCLWorks site and click Order at the bottom of the page. So, you have installed HP LJ ii as the default printer in XVP2, you set it up to Print to File, print, choose a filename (VP will offer you the extension .C00, but you might as well change it to what it really is, .PCL), Then in PCLWorks, you can view the file (a bit on the slow side if it is a long file), convert it to PDF (very compact and extremely fast in Adobe Acrobat Reader 8), or even to a multi-page TIFF compressed in CCITT Fax 4. This latter allows you to email the document, and for the recipient (with, say Irfanview) to mark up the file with notes, and then return it to you, all without buying a pay-for version of Adobe Acrobat. Export to EPS or PS is not supported. PCLWorks cost $us89 at this writing. You can see a reasonably accurate rendering of your file on the PCLWorks screen, but to get pixel accuracy, you have to convert the PCL to another format. In other words, PCLWorks is pixel-accurate, it just doesn't show you that on the screen. Note that XVP2 did have the option for PostScript output, but I've heard the rumour that many many presses balked the the PDF files produced directly by VP.

How do I know if I have XVP2 files?

Why use XVP2 in 2007? One reason would be if you happen to have it lying around and you once used it. Getting back on the old horse is a much more comfortable learning curve than burning a month of your time learning a completely different product. Or you might never have used XVP2, but you might have some publications in that format in your vault. Don't underestimate the amount of work involved in converting publications to different platforms. On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of publications in XVP2, you have probably already upgraded to something better designed for the office world, such as Corel Ventura 8.

XVP2 documents have multiple files, all of which are necessary to reconstitute the publication. Missing a file? Forensic time.

• basename.CHP - the brain centre of each chapter. I call it the chapter file. Do not attempt to edit CHP files. The result may be regret. One reason is that Ventura expects each line to be padded with a space.
• basename.CIF - a small file that names the printer.

In addition, each chapter may have other files:

• basename.CAP - I call it the caption file. It contains text which is in frames, not on the basepage.
• basename.VGR - concerned with graphics.
• basename.FRM - for "form", concerned with layout.

Each chapter has a stylesheet
somethin.STY which is specified on the first line of the CHP file. Do not edit CHP files, merely view them. Also do not edit STY files, they are binary.

Each chapter may have zero or more word processor files with the extensions:

• TXT - text
• GEN - a particular form of text generated by VP itself
• WS - WordStar

Each chapter may have zero or more image or graphics files.

• GEM
• IMG
• PCX
• TIF
• IML - one goes with each TIF file.

There are other extensions allowed. These files, if present, will be listed on the second (or third) and subsequent lines of the CHP file. Only view the CHP file, do not attempt to edit it.

And the following files which appear to be discardable:

• basename.$?? - backups of crucial files, such as CHP. Backup of a chapter file is labelled $HP.
• LOG - HIX - TNX - created when pages are being printed to a file rather than to a printer.

So, each chapter contains one or more pages. If convenient, it could be a thousand pages. The next up level of organization is the Publication, which contains one or more chapters, as specified in the PUB file.

So, reversing the process, here's what you need:
the PUB file, if present. Each CHP file listed in the PUB file. For each CHP file, its associated CIF file, any associated CAP, VGR or FRM files, and every file which is actually named in the CHP file.

Then somebody who has XVP2 can print it. Or maybe even convert if to PDF.

Sometime later, I'll go into how to distinguish XVP2 CHP files from XVP3 and Corel VP 4.2 files.

URL: This web page is:   http://members.shaw.ca/berry5868/xvp2.htm    Last modified October 18, 2007