My DIL is a hardworking genealogist who not only researches families, but also writes brief profiles of her subjects by spotlighting them in short biographies that combine brief narratives, big photos, and great page layout. It’s similar to the personality profiles you see in Forbes magazine, but with one big photo. When a prospect client asks her for samples, her current practice is to she merge 4-5 profiles into one PDF and email it to her prospect, but the overall visual effect of these merged images (side by side by side, with no spacing between them) it’s really detracts from her great work. It’s hard to explain in words.
She doesn’t upload them to her website because of IP issues given her very artistic approach.
We are looking for a better way to present her work so that it does justice to her work and maybe opens like a book. She is familiar with digital flipbooks, but says they are expensive. Are flipbooks the best way to showcase beautiful page layouts like this? Are there low-cost flipbooks? Again, she wants to email samples to prospects rather than upload them for display.
Whatever word processor she uses to write the text can easily place the photos more prettily. A word processor is not a page layout tool and somebody who does page layout for a living is cringing right now at my suggestion.
But in e.g. Microsoft Word or Google Docs it’s easy enough to flow text around photos, place and size and margin them on the page wherever desired, etc. Then when the layout is to her liking, “print” that document as a pdf and send the static pdf to the customer.
For sure there are more powerful dedicated tools far beyond my ken. But those have learning curves too. Depending on what tools she already knows now it may be easier to learn a couple features in e.g. Word than learn all about Adobe PageMaker or whatever from scratch.
IIRC, I think she designs these pages in Adobe Indesign or PowerPoint. Each page looks great by itself, but when she groups several PDFs together there is no separation or margin between the pages, so the overall beauty of each is lost. Everything looks jumbled together. There’s got to be a more professional presentation package, yet one that is affordable to a stay-at-home mom. IIRC, she uses a free PDF program instead of Adobe Acrobat. Perhaps AA has a flipbook feature.
I use Canva for creating ads for my kung fu school and I am far from a designer (but technically inclined). They turn out nice. The tools are easy to use.
Instead of a single PDF, could she make 3 or 4 separate ones–each showcasing a single client–and send that to her prospect, attached to an email?
Has she looked in to booklet creating using Canva?
She just said she is designing these pages using PowerPoint, not in Indesign, because that’s all she has. This is NOT my strong suit, but I think what will work best is to present these pages in a group or book fashion. Flipbooks tends to be for online sharing, I believe. She simply wants to showcase them so they look really nice. Maybe she should simply send them to a prospect as a PPT slideshow. They can then stop the slideshow and look at each page, IIRC.
“grouping pdfs together” is the part that makes no sense. PowerPoint ought to be able to create a single PDF containing the pages she wants where each page looks like what she wants.
There is some step where she’s using a half-assed tool wrongly to create the situation. Or your explanation is loosing something in translation between her head, her mouth, your ears, your fingers, and our (or at least my) brain. Or maybe both.
We (I) can’t help until we can understand the problem.
I don’t really understand this portion. Artists put their work on their websites all the time. If she’s worried about personalized information being public, maybe she could create a portfolio of a fictionalized person to display?
Her page design of these genealogical biographies are gorgeous. It took her a long time to perfect it, so she doesn’t want lots of people appropriating it.
“grouping pdfs together” is the part that makes no sense. PowerPoint ought to be able to create a single PDF containing the pages she wants where each page looks like what she wants.
Ah, now I understand after talking to her again. She designs each page in PPT, then saves each design as a separate PDF, then merges these separate PDFs into one big PDF, then emails it to her prospect. She says the freeware PDF-maker she uses allows NO customization of the PDF, so there’s no way to tweak the background on each image or the spacing of the design on the background, for instance.
So, why isn’t she just emailing the PPT file to the prospect? Because last year two people told her they couldn’t open her PowerPoint file, as they didn’t have PPT on their PC/tablet. I have no idea how many people have PPT on these devices, but her clients tend to be affluent.
Build the entire deck of PPT slides for one customer / subject as a single PPTX file.
In PPT, choose File >> Print.
In the print dialog box, under the “Printer” dropdown, select the “Microsoft Print to PDF” as the choice.
Click the big [Print] Button.
A “Save as” dialog box will open where she can choose the name and folder for her shiny new PDF of all those slides looking EXACTLY as they did on-screen.
I had no idea FlipBook is an industry term and I apologize for showing my ass. The passage above made me think she wanted a printed paper folio to carry around.