Today's obsession is with my desktop publishing software. Fortunately, being all jobless as I am, I can follow every silly whim!

So! My software is PagePlus X2 by Serif. In the last couple of months I've been working on a few small projects. I've written letters, made cards, many calendars, journal covers. Last week, I made postcards!

The more I work with my software, the more impressed I am. I vividly recall working with the first version I bought... version 3, back in the very late 1990's: Frustration! because I wanted to do this and it just would not let me. But now we've got version X2. When I want to do this, I just have to figure out how to do it, and then it's done!

For instance, I wanted two postcards printed on one sheet of paper... and I wanted crop marks, not right on the edge but about an eighth of an inch inside. I could have drawn these in, of course, but I wanted them to print automatically! No Problem: I just had to figure out "bleed area guides" in the margin settings.

So, now that I'm a brilliant maker of postcards and calendars and such, I've decided to broaden my horizons to book making.

Now, I'm not talking cut and paste and print pages and staple them together, here. No! Too boring! I'm talking signatures that need to be sown together! And organizing pages for signatures ... well, it's kind of intimidating.

In making signatures, the pages don't flow from page 1 to page 2 to page 3. Well, they do when you're finished with the book ;) but when you print them you actually print page 16, page 1, page 14, page 3, page 2, page 15... yeah. complicated much?

So if I'm going to start the project, I really need to finish it, because if I try to come back to it after a break, the 16, 1, 14, 3 page thing is not going to make sense anymore! ya know? heh.

And the fact that I need to finish my project just makes my Scanner self all panicky. And is why, even tho I've been thinking about desktop publishing a Project Gutenberg book since I got that version 3 software back in the 90's, I've never tackled the project!

oh, hey, I just noticed that Serif has a free site where they give away older versions of all their major software, If you're interested in doing some dtp yourself! (windows Only. Sorry apple people!) hm, check out the store there, too... some interesting and nicely discounted stuff.

  Free Serif Software

Static8 > Journal > Archive > 15 July 2008 Entry