Publishing Software

Publishing software can be useful to design and print professional-looking fliers, posters and newsletters. Be aware that most good, modern publishing tools will require a graphical environment like MS Windows, and also take a lot of hard drive space.

Why make fliers, posters or newsletters?

You will probably want to print fliers to mail out to customers and/or to display around town on bill-boards.

You might want to create posters, but you'll probably leave that up to the video tape producers and promotional companies and use the ones supplied by them.

Newsletters are uncommon, but might be useful to inform your store staff of managerial comments and ideas or general store events or even to send monthly or bimonthly newsletters out to your customers!

Programs

Programs like Aldus Page Maker or some of the more expensive word processors present the user with an easy to use (but usually complicated) page designing interface. You may want to get tutoring on how to use the software, or simply hire an expert to do the publishing for you.

Programs like Broderbund TypeStyler and Aldus Typestry are very good text manipulators, allowing you to make flashy, eye-catching text to include in your published printouts.

I strongly suggest getting a laser printer if you're planning on doing a lot of publishing, but, although slower, an ink jet printer will do. Dot-matrix printers are often of such low quality (and are so slow) that it's not worth spending so much money on the software when you're output doesn't look much better than if you simply typed it in a word processor or on a typewriter!