Free Desktop Publishing Software

DTP to create newsletters, magazines, books, brochures, calendars, cards, etc

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Free Desktop Publishing Software

The free desktop publishing software (sometimes known as DTP software) allow you to create print and electronic publications like brochures, books, newsletters, letterheads, newspapers, business cards, envelopes, posters, photo albums, greeting cards, invitation cards, leaflets, calendars, flyers, fax covers, door hangers, web pages (although you may have better control for web pages if you have a true web editor), and so on.

Actually, desktop publishing tools are basically design software that let you flexibly place and manipulate text and graphics. You can move text and graphics to any arbitrary position on the page, and the software often come with templates that you can build on. They also allow you to control the colours ("colors" if you use US English) in your publication/document, so that the colour you see on your screen better matches what is produced when it is printed out.

(For those who are wondering what the differences between such software and word processors are, the latter don't usually give you that much flexibility in where you can place text and graphics, and may not provide the control you may want to layout your printed page, set the colours, embed the fonts, and so on. If you're producing publications, rather than just writing documents, the specialized software here may be easier to use than fighting your wordprocessor to get the job done.)

For those who are doing desktop publishing ("DTP") regularly, the high-end commercial desktop publishing tool used by many professionals is Adobe InDesign. If you only dabble with DTP to publish the occasional brochure or newsletter, and don't want to sink a lot of money into the software, you may be interested in Serif PagePlus X3 (which is what I use). It's a fully featured program with all the usual features you need in such a program. It also has the ability to import and export PDF files, which is handy, since PDF is a portable format that is accepted by (probably) all professional printers, so you can create your publication, embed whatever fonts and pictures you need in it, export it as PDF and have it printed exactly the way you want it to. (And you can import PDF publications from other software for editing too.)

(Note: possibly due to the complexity of such software, there are very few free ones around that I know of. Hence this is a very short page. If you know of any more free ones, that are not just crippled versions of commercial tools, let me know.)

Disclaimer

The information provided on this page comes without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book, document or service is listed here or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.