Adobe Indesign

Now I feel like a complete idiot, I've had Publisher for years, never bothered to look at it. You'd think when you searched for 'booklet' in Word it might give you a hint.

I prefer Corel Draw for things like this.

Mike

InDesign from Adobe.

USD 700!

I'm only laying out 8 pages of plain text that'll be printed on our own mono laser printer!

Me thinks I'll try Publisher, if that doesn't cut it then I'll think about inDesign but the 'bundles' seems a better deal.
But heck, all this stuff looks really great but seriouly you need the training and the skills to really use it. If I get a big budget job, way, way better to get a pro to do the job and deal with the printer.

I believe InDesign still has a 30 day demo, and the CD Booklet template is pretty well all you need at that point.
It's expensive, but very useful if you're doing much layout. It's pretty well eclipsed Quark as a layout tool in the past few years.

Use any program you like. But print using ClickBook from Blue Squirrel: http://www.bluesquirrel.com/products/clickbook/

Worley

Bob,

How about trying the free tool PDFCreator from SourceForge. Use photos or word or whatever you like for the pages.

When you go to print you can print from that program or Adobe Acrobat:

Print
Fit-to-page option
Properties/Features/Two-sided printing, Book (landscape orientation)

You may have to re-enter those settings under printer options.

Print the odd or even pages to make it come out correctly then flip the pages at the request of the printer and do the other sides.



If you have Word 2000 or later there are free Macros that can print booklets. Word 2003 or later can automatically number the pages.
For other shortcuts using Word look here and here.

For Publisher 2003 there are tips here and here.


If you have a decent scanner you can do a lot with re-arranging pages or part of them or photos, etc without having to go crazy with Word or Publisher or anything else and then just print the pages from the scanner.

John

Thanks John and Worley,
I'll certainly look into all those options.
The latest version of Word I have is 2002, should get it upgraded shouldn't I.

I think at some point in time I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get something like inDesign. I'm getting more clients who want large runs and that means going out to offset printing and printers in general want things a certain way. Just that this is our first real job with a mulitpage booklet and inDesign would be massive overkill at the moment.

Plus as I said before, there's just too many skills we seem to be expected to have in this game.
On top of that the number of apps we have to pay for is one thing, learning them is another and then there's the task of keeping them running and updated.

Word 2002 was the last good Word version.

If I had to pay $200 per PC not to upgrade to Word 2003, I would.

I have it on one machine for a specific need, but truly hate many design decisions that screw up my work.

Word 2007 may be OK, but now you're a beginner again (it is VERY different).

InDesign is wonderful (I've been using it since 1.0), but it's not just about learning the program. You also have to learn a LOT about printing. Is that the best use of your time? People go to art school for at least two years to learn these things, but you can learn it faster in your spare time, right?

:O)

Outsourcing is OK sometimes, if you can find somebody good to work with.

Anyone who really wants to get InDesign, can get a legal copy on eBay for just over $300 (package with old version + upgrade version). Note that InDesign CS3 is coming out in 3 months, with great goodies including 100% OpenType support (instead of 99% in CS2, which clobbered me to the point where I had to use Quark, blecch, for a print project).

Microsoft Publisher documents are accepted by many printing companies nowadays (but ask first). Recent versions of Publisher have gotten a lot better, but it's no InDesign by a long shot. Still, it's a lot easier to learn (for Word users), and at least the layout won't be moving around by itself like can happen in Word.

I've been using the free s/w (Avery Wizard)from the Avery website

It is a wizard that resides in MS Word and it is FREE. Even though it is formatted to use avery products, paper of your choice and a box cutter works just as well. Since I'm on an extremely limited budget in academia, this has been a great time and money saver because it uses Word and I already know that.
It took me about 5 minutes to figure it out and print a jewel box cover. The template number for jewel box inserts is 5693 (two per page) and the booklet template is 8954 If you look around the avery website for their products, you can find the numbers for all types of inserts and labels.

Hope this helps...

John

Here is a link a very good print Program

http://www.fineprint.com/

Bob