Desktop Publishing Software
If you want to make a more complex design than ARTHR can support, then you probably need some desktop publishing software. Here’s a brief run down of the options.
Adobe InDesign is pretty much the standard for ‘proper’ desktop publishing. It’s not cheap at £600, but it’s good, and we know it well. You can get it for Windows and Mac, standalone or as part of the Creative Suite.
Scribus is a free and open-source alternative to InDesign. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and does most of what InDesign can, but it’s not quite as polished. If you can’t stretch to InDesign this might work well for you.
Image editing applications like Adobe Photoshop can be tricky to use, especially for text, and they usually don’t support multiple pages, so you need to find a way of combining the output into a single PDF. We recommend you avoid these, if possible.
Word processing applications like Microsoft Word or Pages on the Mac tend not to support CMYK colours, which is needed for printing in colour, but if you’re just printing in black and white they might be enough. Just make sure you set the paper size precisely (see below), and that you can export a PDF correctly. It might be worth doing a test upload to Newspaper Club with some dummy content before you go too far.