Alternatives to LaTex and Microsoft Publisher

[CPTBadAss]

Last night I learned that LaTeX and Publisher exist. I've been using Word to layout Tactile but it's kind of clunky. I've never used either LaTeX or Publisher. I was wondering if there were any other options out there.

I don't really know where to start and I made the conscious decision that since I knew Word, I'd use it just because there would be less downtime with me learning it. But now I'm curious.

I will say I have little interest in LaTeX because there's code/programming and and far too much technical stuff. I'm not looking to publish technical papers. Dorkvader was telling me about all the addons I could get for LaTeX but that **** was far too much for my uses. I just want something I can download and use out of the box.

[My_Thoughts]

LaTeX is about the standard in academic circles.  It has a very steep learning curve but the results are well worth it.

However for a printed fanzine there might be other publishing options out there I don't know about.

[ttzhou]

Is Adobe InDesign still around? That might work.

However I second My_Thoughts, LaTeX is the  choice with the most potential but also the steepest learning curve.

[ddot]

Here’s a vote for Adobe InDesign.  I haven’t used it myself, but I used its predecessor Adobe PageMaker back in high school when I got sucked into helping with the yearbook and the newspaper.  It’s basically a WYSIWYG layout editor.  Text boxes, picture boxes, reflow of columns etc.  Probably a good balance of features and learning curve.  I know you can get the cloud versions for a few bucks a month now.  Or there’s always other ways to obtain Adobe products…

You may also want to look into Scribus.

I should also mention I’ve only ever found layout editors good for the actual layout.  As for content creation, MS Word is still my go to program.  I haven’t found anything else that’s as good at helping to find those odd typos, grammatical mistakes etc that look rather embarrassing later.  Type it in Word, strip the formatting, dump the raw text into a layout editor and Bob's your uncle.

[clacktalk]

Indesign is a great tool for magazines. I used indesign in hs for the school newspaper and in college for an Asian-American magazine.

Indesign is the best

[nuclearsandwich]

I used to use all these tools. Publisher is probably the most straightforward to get up and running with. InDesign is likely the best in class but it's priced like it knows it. LaTeX is pretty excellent but because of how opinionated it is I think it'll be difficult to get it to acquiesce to punk rock.

You could prototype everything in HTML and then print the flowed content and lay it out by hand.

[CPTBadAss]

I'm going to say it right now. I'm ruling out LaTeX. I'm not into it. I just put it in the title because it seems to be well known.

Looking like Publisher and Scribus are good options for me. I was considering doing a cut and paste job like with scissors and glue sticks but my template in Word will work and I'm relatively comfortable with it after putting some time into it.

Appreciate the suggestions everyone, please keep em coming .

[Acerk]

Ruling out LaTeX is a good idea. Things get very complicated, very fast with it. You want to have a workflow that ensures you don't have to do the same thing over and over again. That's were you have to have an insanely technical understanding of LaTeX as soon as you want to depart from the science paper look. I used it for my CV a short while, but soon found myself unable to maintain it and achieve the simple things I wanted.

Have you thought about making it a website instead; a blog or an online magazine? Web projects are a lot easier to manage, partly because you don't have to repeat time consuming processes like formatting over and over. It would also help you out with distribution. I imagine a project like this could be quite time consuming in the long run, which could end up biting you in the butt. With an online operation, it's a lot easier to have other people contribute as guest writers and operators, and you wouldn't have to format every contribution people make.

[CPTBadAss]

Hard copy only for now. We've got enough blogs. I may add a blog to go *with* the hard copy but my goal is to keep this on paper.

[Acerk]

In that case, the tool you are most competent with, is probably what you should tackle this project with. It seems like that's Word. I can't think of any other editor that would allow you to get started as quickly as Word.

If you're not using it already, you should get acquainted with the Style function of Word. It will save you a ton of time and effort if you consistently use it. Instead of having to chase down every paragraph, picture or quote when you want to make a change to the design, you rather change the style, and it's applied everywhere. Having a good workflow will limit the time you spend formatting instead of making content, reduces errors and the time you spend on quality control as a result.

[CPTBadAss]

Oh cool, work computer has Publisher. And it's a laptop. Guess I'm going to give this a shot.

[pr0ximity]

You've already got good recommendations here, and I think Publisher or Word is probably the best way for you to go at least until you find things you want to do with them but can't. My thoughts for anyone else:

My vote is for InDesign, but only if you're already comfortable with another Adobe creative suite product. If you know your way around Photoshop/Illustrator, you can put together some awesome looking stuff.

LaTeX is one of my favorite things in the world, but it would take way too much of your time to get something that looks like a magazine.  It's much quicker for papers, and beemer presentations.

I haven't had a ton of success with Publisher in the past, but I haven't put much time into it either. I can see the appeal though.

[CPTBadAss]

Well I found my Office 2010 CD and stuff so I'm reinstalling Publisher and trying that out. Thanks for the tips everyone.

[davkol]

What I usually do is write in Markdown, and then export the text to a LaTeX template via pandoc. Extremely convenient. I have no idea what you're trying to achieve though. Typesetting directly in any kind of TeX is kinda hardcore, although LaTeX and other ¿distributions? of TeX, such as ConTeXt, are quite close to user-friendly.

Try Lyx, if you want a LaTeX almost-WYSIWYG graphical environment.