Mechanics of LayOut

Feh.

My head hurts, but it's done. I just finished knocking out that 12 page newsletter, including wandering through the wonderful world of photoshop and cursing at MS:Word which is at best a mediocre layout solution that I'm compelled to use for the sake of compatibility (i.e., if I pass off the newsletter to someone back at the church down there, none of them have Adobe Pagemaker or Designer, and few have Publisher).

From time to time a lot of us are going to get stuck either knocking out a newsletter of some kind, or finding someone to do it for us - it helps to speak the language and know the territory. First off, in dealing with any print shop, hand them a MS:Publisher file and listen to the screams of agony - Publisher uses a non-standard color palette that doesn't match up with the inks the nice print shop has (leading to time-consuming matching efforts, or substandard print quality), and second, the print shop may not even have a copy of Publisher to read your file with....

Adobe Pagemaker or InDesign are better lay-out programs and provide a standard color palette known as CMYK that your local print shop with will love you for...and when you factor in Adobe Acrobat Pro (which is the "official standard" when it comes to creating PDF files), suddenly life is good...as print shops *love* it when you hand them the document as a standard print-quality pdf.

Layout's great, but you usually end up having to factor in photo manipulation - playing with contrast, color levels, cropping to fit, re-sizing, and similar little adventures. Adobe Photoshop, while possessed of a learning curve, is really the way to fly with this task. The crippleware passing itself off as image editing software in MS:Office is at best....mediocre. Photoshop is worth every penny...particularly when it comes time to edit unsightly shadows and features out of a photo.

Finally, once you've put it all together and pdf'd it, then ship it off to friendly printer...and if at all possible, get a proof copy before you sign off on nuking 1500 copies for your favorite organization :)

Ah well...another day another dollar :) A good Saturday night to one and all...I'm off for chowder...