InDesign CS3 vs. Framemaker/Ventura

Question

Has anyone used InDesign CS3 for producing long, text-intensive, books? How does it compare to Framemaker or Ventura? Will InDesign handle multi-page tables, for example? Is it possible to rotate multi-page tables 90 degrees (landscape table on a portrait page) without breaking them? What about footnotes, endnotes, etc.? Comments from users with experience in all three would be most welcome.

Answer 1

bbsydney --
Given your description of your project -- a long, structured book composed of many text files and many images -- I'd think that Ventura would probably work best for you, simply because I just think it's by far the best software package out there for that type of job.
But as a long-time Ventura user -- and big-time Ventura fan -- I'd advise you to use InDesign instead, for the very concerns you've given. I'm not plugged in to the Corel community nearly as much as others, but I haven't heard any glimmer of hope from anyone that Corel plans to do anything with Ventura in the future. A big problem is that Ventura was written using a lot of Draw 10 code, but now that Draw is at version 14, I suspect Corel won't want to expend a lot of resources to completely overhaul Ventura to create a new version for it.
My biggest concern over Ventura's future is exactly what you've mentioned: that it won't be usable at all seven to 10 years down the road when Bill Gates rolls out a new OS. I know several Ventura users who say it runs just fine on Vista, but there's a great deal of doubt as to whether it will run at all on the next OS generations.
I guess it's possible that Adobe will stop producing publishing software in the future, but this seems unlikely given that ID has become such a dominant player. On the other hand, Corel effectively stopped producing publishing software over five years ago.
This is actually why I'm here at all on Adobe's site. I've reached the point where I feel I need to explore other options since I'm uncertain whether Ventura will be a future option for me at all. I have several projects I may not ever move to ID, but I at least want to know what it will take to do so in case I ever need to.
You also asked about FrameMaker, which I also looked at briefly for my projects. I found that even the latest version of it couldn't handle several important tasks I would need it to do for the types of products I publish which, like yours, are research-based and include numerous text files/articles, tables, figures, and images. My understanding is that FrameMaker is primarily used by book publishers who need to be able to pour mainly text into a long, highly structured documents. But my experience with it was that it just couldn't do what I would need it to do in terms of producing complex tables and efficiently laying out magazine spreads, which are the tasks that take up the most of our production time.
I don't think FrameMaker's future is as bleak as Ventura's, but on the other hand Adobe recently released a long-awaited new version of it and apparently it didn't exactly blow its users away with a slew of new capabilities and features. Like Corel, Adobe seems to not be sure what to do with FrameMaker. Unlike Corel, however, Adobe does actually know FrameMaker exists...
Hope this helps.