Ventura Publisher to Indesign - Tag's to paragraph styles

[josér40591161]

I'm a brazilian Indesign user. Anyway, I've searched about Corel Ventura workflow transpose to Indesign - I've a friend with a big trouble with Ventura: all of your production depends Ventura's tag export. His website database receive these codes and formatting this automatically equal like your Ventura's publication.

My question:

1) Can I would use GREP Style to map a document with @Tags used in his website's database to convert to Indesign Paragraph and Character styles, automatically? How to do that?

2) How to export Ventura tags specifications to Indesign, in this case creating the paragraph styles with the same configurations of Ventura's corresponding tags?

I've searched about 1 month or more to find a solution, and u will be to me a light at the end of tunnel. Literally

[MW Design]

VP's tagged text more resembles QXP's in their simplicity. Ventura also doesn't export the actual styling information.

You really should do two things. One is to obtain a copy of a VP tagged text export and compare it to one from ID. Do note that you do not need ID's style definitions. That can all be deleted. And export ID's tagged text in the non-verbose version.

What you will find in comparing the two tagged text files in a good text editor is that you can, via PERL expressions (which takes a good text editor), to reformat the Ventura style tags to that ID can use. Likely for the Body Text style you will need to actually add the style definition, I always have had to. But that too is easy in that good text editor that will become your friend.

An import of such a tagged text file will create paragraph styles with the Basic style definition. Redefining those styles to what the VP or web site shows will be resusable in subsequent tagged text translations and once those styles are made, importing your translated tagged text files will result in an ID formatted file.

This may all sound confusing. But it is simpler than it may sound. So again, do obtain a sample VP tagged text file so you can see how it works.

Mike

[Kenneth C. Benson]

1) I don't think GREP styles are going to help you. GREP styles automatically apply a character style to certain kinds of text. So, for example, you can build a GREP style into a paragraph style that says that anytime Indesign finds a sequence of 3 digits followed by a hyphen followed by 4 digits (000-0000, basically a 7-digit phone number) it should be displayed in bold. This formats the digits, but it doesn't make the digits go away. You're going to have @tags that need to be changed into Indesign styles. GREP styles could find them and format them, but they would still display.

That doesn't mean you can't use Find/Replace, or even GREP Find/Replace to search for @tags and replace with Indesign paragraph styles. But if it were me, I would want to prep my text in between Ventura and Indesign (as Mike mentioned) so I could bring finished text into Indesign. To start, I would use a text editor like Notepad++ to search for Ventura's tags and replace them with Indesign Tagged Text markup. I would work my way backwards, make some sample text in Indesign, assign paragraph styles to it, highlight the text, and export it to Tagged Text (Tag Form: Abbreviated, you might have to experiment with the encoding, but I would begin with ANSI since you're coming from Ventura).

After you've done a few files manually you should be ready for some automation.

2) It is possible to preserve a small subset of the stylesheet by exporting RTF from Ventura, and importing RTF back into Indesign. You won't get much, though, and IMO it's not worth it. You only get what Ventura, Word, and Indesign can all do and what Corel decided to include in the RTF export. It's basic stuff like font, font size, font weight, line spacing, alignment. Anything that RTF can't describe (like paragraph rules) you'll still have to rebuild by hand. If you do try exporting RTF from Ventura, be careful not to save the Ventura file after exporting. Export RTF and then close the Ventura pub without saving.

A lot of what you're going to be able to do depends on how clean the exported Ventura text is. I run into some pretty messy Ventura text with lots of tracking mixed up with italic, small caps, bold and other coding. This begins to make the number of possible character formatting search and replaces much greater. Plus I think I remember Ventura's idea of small caps coding was hopelessly stupid, something like S<smallcapson>MALL<smallcapsoff> C<smallcapson>APS<smallcapsoff>. It's been a few years now, and I've obviously forgotten the actual codes, but Indesign uses something much simpler and more industry-standard: <smallcapson>Small Caps<smallcapsoff>. (Again, the code is not right, but the correct codes would be applied to upper and lower case text.). Discrepancies like these make an automated transition from Ventura to Indesign difficult. You would have to not only search for small caps text and convert the coding and then move the coding to include the full caps small caps, but you would have to convert small caps text from upper case to lower case.

Kenneth Benson

Pegasus Type

[MW Design]

Small caps are thus (at least in CVP10):

T<SA>here<^*A*> are <SA>three<^*A*>

But it is consistent no matter the tag and so are easy to pattern match if one looks at text formatted in small caps (or any other attribute) found in an ID exported sample. Which is what I do. Because I have installations of VP, I'll open the VP file, make sample paragraphs of such attributes, export as ID tagged text, then use ID's pattern for the replace part of the Perl expression(s).

If there are a lot of varying attributes, I'll wrap them into a Javascript and run it all at once. But for p.styles, I usually just do the Perl f/r route.

I do want to add that there are styles in VP that cannot be transitioned to any current application due to them not having the capabilities, like the option for no-break at the end of a paragraph. So there will likely always be some hands-on work to do after the text is brought into ID.

Mike

[MW Design]

OK. I had another thought...

If these articles/publications are coming from your friends web database, there may be a few other possibilites.

1. One, which is more difficult but your friend may well be able to do it, would be to export from their database and write the ID tagged text directly.
2. Another would be to export as Markdown text.
3. Yet another would be raw HTML export.

Using either of the last two options would make the find/replace with ID-style tags in a good text editor pretty simple.

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi josér40591161 ,

my scripting colleague and friend Werner Perplies did some substantial work to convert Ventura Publisher files to InDesign with his Wps XmlWorker. Best contact Werner: https://www.weepee.de/

Regards,
Uwe

EDITED: Posted a link back in 2019, but the contents was removed.

[Lola157F]

Hi,
I am currently converting Ventura publications to a JSON file structure.
In a second step, I then convert the JSON files into the INDD format.
For the best possible result I need all fonts used in Ventura and the help files for hyphenation and spelling.
For the conversion to InDesign the fonts to be used there are also needed.
If you provide me with test data, I will gladly provide a sample conversion.

Many greetings
Werner

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