Oolite Bulletins

Perhaps somebody in this helpful bunch of people can advise me on this:

Once a month I'm producing a 16 page A5 newsletter. Nothing fancy, mostly text, but with some recurring design elements. Currently I'm doing this in plain LibreOffice, which is possible, and the end result doesn't even look bad, but in some aspects I'm wishing for something a little more comfortable during the editing process. For instance, taking a template and replacing last month's (cropped) picture with a new (cropped) picture at a certain place basically requires me to re-design the page each time. I'd love to simply drag and drop the new picture instead. Apple's Pages could do that, but I'm working on a Windows 7 computer.

So my question is: does someone have a recommendation for Open Source DTP/layout software? Nothing fancy, something pretty basic would suffice, I guess. (I'm not scared by Disney. )

I've heard some good things about Scribus, although I've not used it myself. TeX is probably using a sledgehammer (or, indeed, a bulldozer) to crack a nut.

Disembodied wrote:

I've heard some good things about Scribus, although I've not used it myself.

Yeah, I stumbled across it before I posted. It seems indeed like a small-scale solution, for instance using OpenOffice (and I hope LibreOffice as well) as a text editor. Could be exactly what I need.

Disembodied wrote:

TeX is probably using a sledgehammer (or, indeed, a bulldozer) to crack a nut.

While I'd certainly love to move blocks of text or pictures one RSU* at a time, TeX isn't what I'm looking for. Perhaps iTeX?

But seriously, what I'm looking for is some drag&drop stuff, not editing things by juggling with numbers. That's what I'm currently doing with LibreOffice, and would like to overcome. Also, I haven't used TeX (or rather LaTeX) since typing theses in university, and that part of my life is pretty much behind me. Although it has to be said that the physics department had an amazing TeX distribution in form of Blue Sky's Textures. An integrated editor and compiler that was so fast that you could practically do WYSIWYG TeX. And that was 15 years ago.


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* ridiculously small unit, the basic internal size unit in TeX (1 point = 2^16 RSUs)

Just about any competent word processor would do this. Setup a template for each 'page type' and then base a new page on each page type in turn.