Any Suggestions for Desktop Publishing Software for a Brochure?

[benali72]

Anyone have any suggestions for which Desktop Publishing Software product to use?

My application is creating a brochure on 11 x 17 paper that will be folded twice (a three-panel brochure).  Mainly just text, requires two coiumns per panel, some text positioning, traditional fonts, etc.

Thank You to anyone who has any experience to share.

[TRexx]

Doesn't MS Word have a brochure template? 

[Carrie Cobol]

Yes, I've done quite nice brochures using MS Word.  Trifold and everything.  These days it's almost more critical to have a printer that's up to the task - the software already has the capability.

[The Gorn]

I have used both MS Word and Microsoft Publisher to do this. Here is the difference.

With Word, all of the content must "flow". If you insert something preceding something else, all of the text, graphics, etc that follow the element that you inserted will be shoved forward. If you are doing a tri-fold brochure in Word, getting the positions "right" where the text flows into each panel of the brochure will drive you stark starking MAD.  You constantly have to go back and forth through your document and test where things end up.

In Publisher, you lay out the graphics and text blocks as separate graphic elements that are independent of each other. So if you add content to an existing area, at worst it overlaps the next item until you adjust things. But there is no concept of overall text flow of the document, so you aren't modifying the appearance of every other region of your piece when you modify one part of it.

Publisher has many templates, including brochures. I am not certain that Word ships with a tri-fold brochure, but examples are very easy to find on teh intertubes.

[benali72]

Wow, thanks for the great advice.

G0ddard, you just save me a ton of time messin' with Word.

I'll try Publisher.  Also I'm looking into Serif's Page Plus, one of the very few companies that has successfully competed with MS in this space.  It has a free version and a $99 version, plus a good forum and how-to books.

I looked into InDesign (Adobe's replacement for PageMaker), and it looks like a great product, but at $699 is too much for my budget. Ditto for its main competitor, QuarkXPress, which is $799.

I'm sticking with moderate priced tools like Publisher and Serif Page Plus, either of which looks like it can do the job.

Thanks for the good advice!

[The Gorn]

No problem. And some people have the knack of Word and that methodology just makes more sense to them than a layout oriented program.

For me, Word is the preferable tool - until I work on multi-page documents (like a tri-fold brochure inherently is) and the flow behavior becomes non-intuitive and, frankly, confusing.

You certainly don't need InDesign or QuarkExpress for this.