Many people will have used desktop publishing programs either at school work or elsewhere. In most cases this would involve using something like Microsoft Publisher or maybe even InDesign by Adobe. Both great programs (although personally I find Publisher a bit prescriptive) but if you would like a great free alternative then we suggest you try Scribus.
Scribus is a mature program which has been around since 2003. It can be used for most layout task from a full magazine to an A6 leaflet. The fact it can also print to PDF means it can also be used to produce downloadable documents such as Newsletters and Manuals.
It’s not the simplest program to use, there are lots of options which is what you would expect from a program which is as powerful as this. Luckily the is a lot of help in the form of searchable wiki pages. So the first time you need to learn how to do something you may need to look it up, either in those wiki pages or in toe inbuilt help file but it is pretty intuitive, so once learned you should remember.
As with all of these programs we suggest the first thing to do it download it and have a play. It’s better to learn this stuff when you have a bit of time rather than when you are on a work schedule.
Scribus is available for Window, Linux, Mac O/S and other operating systems. As normal we strongly reccomend that you only download it via the official website: http://www.scribus.net/
