I might be assuming responsibility for publishing a monthly newsletter. It usually runs about 20 pages and is a mixture of text and photos. Pages have two columns. The person currently doing the job is using a literal cut and paste approach with paper printouts, photocopying his work and then delivering the photocopy to local printer for actual production. Monthly run is about 1,500 copies.
I am reasonable computer literate and would like to use a publishing program that would let me lay this out on screen, copy and paste word files that are submitted and then send a file of some type to the printer for production. Ideally I could also create a pdf file copy for posting on our website.
I’d like to keep costs as low as reasonable possible. What would you recommend?
When you say to the printer for production, do you mean your printer as in machine at your office? Or an outside print shop? If you’re using an outside print shop, ask them for recommendations.
If you have Microsoft Office Suite I’d recommend Publisher. It has templates you can start with and it doesn’t have to be a boring two columns on every page. It’s really easy to learn just by poking around in it.
My company uses Adobe InDesign. It looks awesome but the learning curve is out of this world. It’s also expensive.
I was going to suggest Publisher as well. I don’t currently have it on my PC, but I’ve used it in the past, and it’s easy to use, especially if you’re already familiar with Office products. You can probably do most of what it does using Word, but Publisher does make it easy. If it’s not in your Office package, it can be bought separately for a little over $100.
Let me second this. My wife is a graphic designer and has worked in print shops. IIRC, Publisher is a very difficult program for pro printers to work with. If you are working with print shop, let them know you are on a limited budget (if you are) and your general level of expertise and see what they recommend. My wife uses InDesign, but as noted in another post, it has real damn steep learning curve.
I use Open Office for word processing, it’s an EXCELLENT program for that purpose, but I have no idea how well it works for desktop publishing.
If you want to try InDesign, albeit an older version, you can download it for free (legit) from this link:
Adobe essentially made the whole of CS2 free, by accident. Ah well, they’ve kept the links active - that version of Photoshop is worth having in any case.
Even if you use an outside print shop, you can save native Publisher files (which lots of commercial printers can’t/won’t work with) to PDF, which most printers will accept.
No program is difficult for a printer to work with if you export to a PDF as your last step. Sending a printer ‘live’ files from any app, be it Word, Publisher or InDesign, is a bad bad bad bad bad idea.
If it views and prints from PDF, it will RIP and print for a printer, with very few exceptions that have mostly to do with color-matching and some advanced transparency issues.
From a perspective of more than 25 years using publishing software, I too would recommend Publisher as the simplest “fancy layout” tool available. Word completely sucks at it no matter how many people have been able to bash out something that looks sorta-kinda professional with far too much work and hassle.
For serious work I’d recommend InDesign, but its learning curve is pretty steep and it’s a real sledgehammer for the tack-hammer job of a simple newsletter.