[SunRescue] Should an editor require you to think?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, David Rouse wrote:

> On 3/7/01 at 8:30 PM, Joshua D. Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:
> >and Microsoft Publisher (a real DTP program).
> 
> Okay, *that* makes me mad :-) (real DTP = QuarkXPress, at least for folks
> like me [newspapers]). Of course my cousin just laughs -- she uses Frame.
 
Well, I'm sure that QuarkXPress is a pretty nice product.  And I certainly
wouldn't want to do anything in color in Publisher, but for simple
greyscale work, Publisher is mostly fine.  Greyscale designs with lots of
complex images might be a bit too much for publisher.

I was the editor/designer for a small newletter for a year (It was about
12-16 pages long and printed quarterly), and my tools were Access, Word,
Publisher, and AOL (AOL was because someone gave me an account that they
were paying for and I didn't have email anywhere else.).  I wasn't as
hardcore on unix then, although I still really liked Suns.  Anyway, I
pasted all articles into Access, then I had a script that loaded the
article into Word and formatted it (word was used because Publisher could
understand the style commands on import) for easy import into Publisher.
All I had to do was select which pages a story would fit on and the
newsletter was basically done for me.  I just had to go through and fine
tune it.  QuarkXPress was way out of the budget for doing this simple
newsletter.  

If I were to do it again, I might consider using Postgress, Python and
Illustrator or something like that.  Then, I could have python generate
the basic newsletter as a postscript file that could then be touched up in
Illustrator.  By touched up I mean placing graphics, and tweaking the mask
that controls how the text wraps around the graphic.  Or maybe I would
learn Tex well  enough to do more complicated word wrapping around
graphics.  QuarkXPress would still likely be out of my budget.


--
Joshua Boyd