Thread: September Newsletter

Garza has produced the September newsletter and it can be downloaded in either pdf or Word format:

PDF Word

Good job garza! Another great newsletter.

Thank you.

A stellar job as usual, garza.

Excellent! Thank you, Garza!

Thank you all. I appreciate those words.

Garza what program do you use to produce the newsletter?

The pages are formatted with MS Word. The graphics are produced with a combination of Paint, Gimp, Photoscape, and Inkscape. I've not found any one graphics programme that will allow me to do everything, though I've been told that there are such programmes for Apple. My charcoal pencil drawings I scan with a Canon scanner and leave alone. Sometimes though I like to take a colour-pencil drawing and make it look like a photograph, or do the opposite, make a photograph look like a drawing. And sometimes when I look at a picture I did three or four years ago I can't remember which is which.

Edit - For those who are saying 'aha, you said you only use Notebook', what I've said is I use Notebook for writing. Word processors are designed for page formatting, and that's how I use them.

Originally Posted by garza

The pages are formatted with MS Word. The graphics are produced with a combination of Paint, Gimp, Photoscape, and Inkscape. I've not found any one graphics programme that will allow me to do everything, though I've been told that there are such programmes for Apple. My charcoal pencil drawings I scan with a Canon scanner and leave alone. Sometimes though I like to take a colour-pencil drawing and make it look like a photograph, or do the opposite, make a photograph look like a drawing. And sometimes when I look at a picture I did three or four years ago I can't remember which is which.

Edit - For those who are saying 'aha, you said you only use Notebook', what I've said is I use Notebook for writing. Word processors are designed for page formatting, and that's how I use them.

Have you ever tried scribus?

No. I'll take a look at it.

Well worth a look Garza. I PM'd you a copy of my periodical done with scribus. Once you get the hang of it, man you can do some great stuff. There are lots of video tutorials to give you a leg up.

Scribus looks like a lot more programme than I need for formatting the Newsletter pages. I don't really see what advantage there would be. Can you offer an opinion about what improvement there would be over using Word?

Well you can template, set graphics, wrap text. You can also set text over graphics. I tried using word and found it limited. Certainly , the WF newsletter is not as graphic heavy as my periodical, but since I started using it I am hooked. You can also copy from notebook to scribus text and using the cursor you can set up a box template freehand to suite your needs. Or curve your boxes to match a particular graphic. It also gives you the options to set up backgrounds and or background colours.

I would recommend you stay the course if your comfortable Garza, but you might want to download the program and play around with it on the side and see if it draws your interest.

Mark

As far as graphics go the software I mentioned will do everything I need. I'm not a graphic artist. I just do simple illustrations to add a bit of life to the pages. The emphasis is on the text.

All the things you mention can be done with Word in combination with the other programmes. I write everything in Notebook and put it into Word or on top of graphics where that's needed. Perhaps Scribus makes it easier. I'll do as you suggest and download Scribus and play with it to see if there would be any advantage.

One other point - can Scribus provide a doc or docx file?