🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian 

I moved a lot of my work from FM to Ventura because I wanted extra typographic control, and that's what Ventura gives me (hanging punctuation, kerning and tracking editors, being able to specify not to hyphenate the last word in a paragraph or over a page/column break, ability to set widows and orphans separately, etc, etc). Footnotes and endnotes are better supported. There's pretty darn good printing and imposition control, and better colour support than FM has. With the basic package, you can also write scripts. Unlike FrameMaker (and PM and ID), Ventura treats the publication as the base file and all chapters are part of that file. (That is, you don't have book files.) 

I have my workflow quite streamlined now - I receive files in Word, run a VB script over the Word files to pretag them with Ventura codes, them import them into Ventura already largely preformatted. Saves me a lot of time. 

Plus, there's a copy editor view which shows the typesetting codes. Very handy. I hate that I can't view all my codes in FM. 

However, Ventura is definitely more resource hungry than FM and not as stable (though a lot of that comes down to getting the right setup). It really depends on what sort of work you want to do as to what program best suits your needs. 

Dominic