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Ventura Publisher

Ventura Publisher was an early desktop publishing (DTP) layout program. It was probably the first non-Macintosh DTP design package, based initially on the GEM operating system and later on DOS, Windows and Macintosh.

Generally despised as a creative tool, Ventura was popular as an in-house DTP layout application – especially for long financial or technical documents. It was bought by Corel in 1993 and has been updated by them ever since.

Vignette

A photograph that has a vignette applied has had its edges faded out, or feathered. This used to be applied a lot to portraits. In essence it is similar to the feathering technique that can be achieved with Adobe Photoshop.

Virtual PC

Microsoft's Virtual PC is an application program that can run multiple operating systems in a virtual environment. Originally, it was built so that Mac users could run Windows programs on their Apple Macs.

Ironically, Virtual PC now runs on Windows PCs as well as Macs and is useful for web designers for testing web sites under different operating systems and browsers. Virtual PC allows designers to install a number of versions of operating systems, from Windows 95 through to Windows XP and Linux.

The downside of Virtual PC is that, on a PowerPC processor Macintosh, it will generally work very slowly and is generally useful only for occasional use and testing purposes.

Apple have now standardized their Macintosh product range to use Intel computer processors. Moreover, these Macs are now able to boot into Windows natively.