Scribus is a free desktop publishing package that seems to be quite popular, you can download it at www.scribus.net It is open source and cross platform, so it can be used on Windows or Macintosh computers my laptop has Vista and it seems to work fine on that. Before you download it you have to download Windows ghostwriter. Craig Malhoney has produced some good video tutorials on how to use Scribus: see Scribus Video Tutorial 1 Scribus Video Tutorial 2 and Scribus Vidoe Tutorial 3 .Scribus is excellent for producing newsletters and you can download templates for this, and some books have been produced using this program too. It is designed to produce PDF's. The advantages of using Scribus or Pagemaker or suchlike over Word is that you have more freedom to move text and images around the page: you can put a text box or image anywhere on the page. I would not recommend home publishing for serious books, but it is fun to play around with page layouts and try to get some idea of how a finished book would look, and some authors write their books directly onto desktop publishing software. You can export text to other formats too. If you are nosey and want to check out who Craig Malhoney is you can see his website at http://decafbad.net/. A lot of people on the website http://www.linux.com/feature/52351 are quite rude about Scribus, pointing out that it does not import bold or italics, which seem to be fairly basic problems, but others argue that since it is free you should be grateful for what you can get or fork out for Quark or Publisher 97, and its big advantage seems to be that it is OpenOffice compatible. Whilst you can create any layout, templates are always helpful but there are only a choice of four. There is a built in PDF writer so you don't have to have adobe writer. You can download a trial sixty day version of Microsoft Publisher if you want to try it out.
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