Desktop Publishing
By: Chris Holgate
Back in the day I used to publish an amateur fanzine dedicated to the old school Commodore 64 computer and whilst it wasn't the way most teenagers spend their time it was something I genuinely enjoyed doing. This was a fanzine which enjoyed worldwide, low scale distribution and those who are even slightly interested can still find some information about this 12 year old magazine by looking up 'Zine 64 on Google as some of the articles were voluntarily archived by our readers online.
Rather than bringing you here to talk about the past, my reason for mentioning this old fanzine was that I used to spend a great deal of my life using the Serif PagePlus Desktop Publishing (DTP) utility to create the fanzine and since stopping publication I haven't had the need to touch a similar piece of software. It occurred to me this week that I haven't yet covered a DTP application in Click despite having been publishing Herald Express articles for over six years so I went on the lookout for a suitable application as now seemed the right time to redress my mistake.
Desktop Publishing software is used to organise text and graphics to make them presentable for publication as a newspaper, magazine or simply for a school project. Basically you start off with a blank canvas which you then drop text, images, shapes and other assorted elements on to before altering their size, shape and position as well as controlling the way that they interact with one another; allowing text to wrap around images for example. This process of manipulation should result in your final work looking a lot more professional than if you were to have just used a word processor such as Microsoft Word.
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