PRODUCTION ADD LIST UPDATE BOX TO FILL PAGE
By Christopher Ott
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and this may be especially true of desktop publishing.
The arrival of WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) applications about 15 years ago threatened to make page designers out of almost everyone.
Some realized right away that they were in over their heads and stayed with plain-looking documents. That’s a sensible enough choice, but the typewritten look is no longer anywhere near good enough for professional brochures or advertisements.
Others, meanwhile, made the mistake of assuming that having dozens of fonts (in different sizes and styles, no less) meant that they should all be used. The results sometimes looked more like crazed eye charts than brochures, newsletters or flyers.
Now we’re all much more sensible about these things, but the problem remains: If paying a professional graphic designer isn’t an option or if you simply want to learn how to produce professional-looking documents in-house how do you do it?
Fortunately, this is getting easier and more foolproof, even for people without the slightest artistic impulse. The two products best suited to desktop-publishing work for small businesses are Adobe PageMaker Plus and the new Microsoft Publisher 2000. (Two other related products, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, tend to be more powerful and more expensive than what a typical small business would need).
With either PageMaker Plus (available for Windows or Macintosh) or Publisher 2000 (Publisher 98 is the latest Mac version), it’s possible to put together sharp-looking work in a minimum of time.
By far the quickest and easiest way to get decent-looking documents is with Microsoft Publisher 2000, which can be purchased separately or as a part of the Premium, Professional or Small Business editions of the Office 2000 suite.
When you create a new document in Publisher, you’re presented with a catalog of wizards that can take you step-by-step through the process involving newsletters, Web sites, brochures, catalogs, flyers, invitations, business cards, restaurant menus and advertisements.
If you want to create, say, a flyer, Publisher gives you several samples to choose from, or lets you select options like “large picture in the middle” which determine the layout for you.
Publisher also offers choices for other design elements like schemes of matching colors for a particular document. When you’ve got the look you want, all you need to do is enter the text. Publisher can even help with this, because it stores information like your business name, address, phone and fax numbers, and can insert this automatically into all the documents you create.
Publisher can also automatically adjust your text to fit the layout you’ve selected, and it lets you convert your documents to Web pages with the help of a sophisticated design-checking wizard that optimizes what you’ve created for display online. There are also options for saving your files to be taken to a commercial printer.
Adobe PageMaker Plus is a little different. Although it too offers an extensive collection of templates on which you can base your newsletters, brochures, and stationery, it doesn’t walk you through the process of creating them the way that Publisher’s wizards do.
On the other hand, PageMaker Plus allows much greater design control. The use of templates tends to give your documents a kind of cookie-cutter look, whereas PageMaker lets or even encourages you to be more creative.
Most of PageMaker’s features are more sophisticated and offer greater control than Publisher, and it’s a tool that some professional designers use. If it matters to your business, PageMaker can help you avoid creating documents that look like those of everyone else. It even comes with a handy booklet that offers a kind of crash course in design.
There are lots of tips, hints, and before-and-after, bad-to-good design examples for those who want to do it themselves.
PageMaker can also import QuarkXPress files, and can convert your files to HTML or Adobe’s widely used portable document format, known as PDF. It also includes a story editor, which is especially useful for creating longer publications like newsletters, or even magazines or books.
You can rework the basic text for your documents in this editor and then flow it into the layout you’ve designed.
For the best possible look, go to a professional graphic designer. But when you need or want to do it yourself, go with Microsoft Publisher for creating good (if not artistically brilliant) documents in a hurry. And for the tools to be more creative and to design a more distinctive look for your business’ publications, Adobe PageMaker is the better choice.
Christopher Ott is a freelance technology writer and can be reached at [email protected]. Individual questions cannot be answered, but suggestions for future columns will be considered.
