Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
programs for the Mac?

My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
except ~ $1K programs for professionals.

Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.

I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
this is so underdeveloped.

-- Marv Frandsen

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:25:50 -0400, Marv Frandsen wrote
(in message <ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>) :

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen
>

Do you have Word? You can do some pretty good layouts using Word. I have
PageMaker but half the time anymore I use Word. Will do all I need it to do.

--
Buzz

life is too short to drink bad wine!

Marv Frandsen <frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen

I haven't used it but my brother says that Pages which is part of the
iWork package from Apple does a great job with newsletters etc. Cost is
US$79

You can also get hold of a copy of Ragtime Solo from
http://www.ragtime-online.com/ It's free for non-commercial use. If you
want the dictionaries for spell checking it costs 15 Euros

Peter

--
Peter McCallum
Mackay Qld AUSTRALIA

Marv Frandsen wrote:
> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>

Pages, part of iWork, is considered to be a good newsletter program. It
comes with templates for newsletters of various types.

In article <ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>,
Marv Frandsen <frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen



Marv -

I use Appleworks for that need. Does pretty much everything I need an
dthen some.

DMK

In article <ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>,
Marv Frandsen <frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen

Pages is excellent for page layout, text wrapping is easy, adding
pictures is simply drag&drop and it exports to a slew of formats. Comes
as part of iWork. The other app bundled in iWork is Keynote.

You can also use word processors like AppleWorks and MS Word, but
they're not nearly as much fun.

On 6/14/05 3:25 AM, in article
ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, "Marv Frandsen"
<frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?


Microsoft word and just about any word processor have the capabilities of
what once was called desktop publishing.

The name is gone because the genre is gone because the capacity of the word
processor was expanded to include these functions.

ej

in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen
>

You may want to take a look at

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"

The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
Swiss Army knife.

The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.