Publishing and design geeks of my flist, I need help!

[bigsockgrrl]

alibi_shop , wild_irises , pantryslut , imnotandrei , nadyalec , merovingian ?  I suspect that may mean I would much appreciate your attention and input to this post. Thanks!

I'm trying to find a free or shareware program for page layout that will run on Mac OS X.  (Unless a copy of InDesign or Quark somehow falls off a truck for me.... Heck, I'd love to find a homeless and lonely copy of the full Adobe

Comments

[randomorbit]

you might look into Pages. It's part of the iWork suite. it's not free, but it's also not very expensive, and it's pretty intuitive to use, and although Apple positions it as a sort of everything from word processing to media rich documents, basically it's a page layout program. I wouldn't recommend it for simple word processing, and I still don't understand the point of embedding video in documents that aren't presentations, or web pages.

You can easily get a quick and dirty PDF out of any document from the print dialog, but I guess those might not be adequate for print publishing.

[bigsockgrrl]

Thanks for the tip! $80 is much more do-able than $700, and much more appropriate for the current level I'm working at, I suspect. I can consider spending more that $100 on software if I get into selling tens of thousands of copies. I'm probably looking at selling hundreds, and fancy software alone will not raise that number appreciably.

Yeah, I know how to get a pdf from the print dialogue. I'm mainly concerned with layout. And I haven't figured out how to have more control over the pdf that is created with the print dialogue... Maybe it's too rudimentary for that.

[randomorbit]

if you're a current student or school employee, it's more like $70. The print to PDF is not very flexible, it will create a PDF that basically looks like whatever you'd print, and I'm not sure it doesn't just turn the whole document into a low-res graphic without editable text.

You can look on Version Tracker for more page layout options. Here's a shareware program for $40 I came up with searching for page layout. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10844304 I've got no experience with the program itself, but Version Tracker is a great resource.

[bigsockgrrl]

Not a student, yet. The problem is I likely won't have time for these shenanigans once I become a student, so it may not actually pay to wait.

Yes, Version Tracker is good. I've found stuff there, as well as other good places. I'll check that one out after I've recovered from this morning's frustration. Thanks!

[imnotandrei]

What I did, for both InDesign and (now) Illustrator, is scoped out older versions on eBay, and pounced. Net result? I now have both, in their CS3 versions, which have way more horsepower than I'm likely to need, for a total of $150. (Admittedly, InDesign I bought at a charity auction, but...)

So, depending on how old your Mac is (i.e. is it an Intel or PowerPC machine?) you might well be able to run, and find useful, older versions of the software that can be done much more cheaply than the $700 they'd like to charge you.

[nadyalec]

1. Lots of expensive software will run on a trial basis for a month-- might be enough to create what you want!
2. Funnily enough, I think MS Word 08 is pretty dang good for layout. (PC version is much better then Mac-- which are you running?) Free trial I think is 90 days, ~80 on Amazon.

xoxo

Nabil

[bigsockgrrl]

Thanks, all! Your comments have given me many options to consider.