Microsoft Publisher

[woody649]

Originally Posted by terrie

It's because you like beating your head against a wall???

Sorry...that was just too tempting...'-}}

Have we ever met? You seem to know me too well. I do have an unfortunate propensity for beating my cranium against various vertical and all-too-solid constructions.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Originally Posted by terrie

Not the most useful approach for any sort of Microsoft-y type question--although I do understand the point you are making about Publisher...




Terrie

Actually, it is, or can be. The Answers forums are staffed by paid minions who are generally useless (a friend of mine calls them "Bing Monkeys") But there are also legions of very capable volunteer moderators and other "answerers" who offer very useful help. One of them even made t-shirts reading "I am not a Bing Monkey". I wear mine proudly.

[terrie]

steve: Actually, it is, or can be.

As the old adage states...


EMMV...




I think I can safely say that I have never, ever found the Answers forums postings at all useful. After pretty consistent non-Answers, I never click on an Answers' url for any browser search I do. That stated, I'm glad that someone finds useful info there...'-}}




Terrie

[woody649]

Originally Posted by Kayza

I think it's mostly because Publisher is not really designed for books, or anything like that. It's more for flyers and brochures.

Originally Posted by Steve Rindsberg

What Kayza said. And also because (IMO) Publisher seems to be an unwanted step-child of the Office system. It probably has enough users that MS doesn't want to kill it off, but they're not investing much in clothing, feeding or educating it.

I'm bringing this discussion back from the dead because I tried Publisher again for a book, and once again it failed. It's really extremely frustrating.

I have a friend whose daughter loves dragons. According to her mother, she has read ALL the dragon books available ... so she has now written one for herself. It's pretty short, as you might imagine, but I had the bright idea to upload it to Amazon and let her see her book in print. If I can get it done in time, I'll order an author copy and give it to her for Christmas.

My sort of role model for this is a series of small stories by my favorite sci-fi/fantasy/dragon author, Anne McCaffrey. She wrote several very short books that I'm pretty certain were done for her grandchildren, but they were also published as small, up-scale hardcover books with a trim sixe of 5-1/4" x 6-1/4". Every page has a border of some kind, allowing the publisher to shrink the size of the actual text block on the page without making it too obvious.

So I found an image that I think makes a nice page border, and I want to use that for my page background. There's no way (that I've found) to do that in Word, so I decided to try Publisher again, because it offers master pages. It was not overly difficult to create a left-right master page layout with the graphic border. The problem is that when I paste in the text, the text box on the first page doesn't end where it's supposed to end and allow me to link and flow the text to successive pages. The text box on page 1 just expands down off the bottom of the page and out of sight.

Is there a solution? I can't find any setting to NOT allow the text box to auto-expand.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Originally Posted by Kayza

Actually, it's been in the "pro" version of the suite for a long while. It actually makes a lot of sense. Most businesses don't publish books. But a lot of places do do things like flyers, and in house newsletter etc. This is a pretty good tool for this kind of job as long as you don't need really strong graphics expertise and manipulation.

You're correct ...my mistake. I think I was getting it confused with ... um ... that web site software whose name I can't remember.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Originally Posted by Andrew B.

It was probably this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor

Makes sense.

I don't think any of MS' freebie image editors can do a fraction of what Irfanview (free from www.irfanview.com) can do, though. For some odd reason, Irfan (Irfanview's daddy) sorta hides the image editing features. You have to know to press F12 to see them, but they're there.

[woody649]

I use Irfanview for a lot of quick photo editing tasks. A friend in Greece prefers Faststone, which purports to be an image viewer but which, like Irfanview, also offers a lot of additional functionality over being just a viewer. I have links to both on my desktop.


As to the book project ... I'm doing it by the brute force method, in Word. I made two versions of the border as JPEGs -- one for the left-hand pages and one for the right-hand pages. I set up the paragraph styles to keep the text within a virtual box that fits within the borders. After I type in each chapter, I go back and insert the appropriate border image on each page, set it to "wrap" behind the text, anchor it to the page, and expand the edges to the page edges.

Obviously, this is work that would be a one-time deal in any application that can handle master pages ... but Word can't, and trying to do it with master pages in Publisher was a disaster.

Word's European competitor, Softmaker Office TextMaker, purports to have master pages. I'll have to look into how they work for future projects. This little book is going to be under 100 pages and I need to make it happen by Christmas, so this isn't the project I want to use as my vehicle for learning a new program.

[Steve Rindsberg]

For Word, here's something that might be worth a shot:

Design tab | Page Background

That lets you choose not only solid colors and patterns 'n such, but also images.

It doesn't appear to fill the page with the chosen image regardless of image size. Smaller images get tiled. I don't know what it's rule is for what constitutes an image worthy of full page/no-tile treatment. At a guess, page size in inches X 96dpi.

And I'm not sure if you can assign different b/gs for left/right pages.

If you can sort out those two questions, this might be simpler than how you're doing it now.

[woody649]

Thanks, Steve. I tried that, and I couldn't make it work.

The book is done. It was a tad bit labor intensive, but not difficult. But it's something that should have been done in a program that handles master pages -- that, or Word should be able to handle master pages.