Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic suggestions, help?

Hey guys,

I wonder how many FoLCs are involved in web publishing of any sort and can give me some advice?

See, the Malaysian-Singaporean Students Association in my university recently decided to start its own club e-newsletter. It's going to be a PDF thing, sent out twice a term, with tentative plans to make an additional HTML version as well.

No one in the club has any experience in this sort of thing, and I kinda drew the short straw. So I am now the new Communications Director (Editor) in the club.

I am not quite sure how to begin, beyond asking the club members what stuff they would want in a newsletter. For starters, what are the software normally associated with publishing? What factors should I consider when making a decision on which one to use? Are there specific newsletter formats/templates out there?

Perhaps the most important question of all: Assuming the contents are interesting, what specific features distinguish a well-designed/organised newsletter from a poorly designed/organised one?

Any and all help regarding starting a newsletter from scratch (and making regular issues) will be greatly appreciated.

Happy Mothers Day to all FoLC mothers out there!

You could check out RagTime, DTP software for business publishing.

RagTime Solo is the freeware version you can download from www.ragtime-online.com.

It's available in four languages: English, French, Dutch and German.

Unbelievable that such excellent software is available for free. Easy to use too!

You'll have no trouble putting your newspaper together with RagTime Solo. Lots of success!

Ursie

I do quite a lot of this. On Windows PCs the easiest way is to use a graphics word processor (e.g Word) to create your document then a free program called "PDF creator" which you install as a printer driver. You just print the document to this and it comes out as a PDF. It's at

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796

The complete Windows version with installer is about a 14mb download.

The only snag with the versions I've used to date is that the PDFs it creates won't load properly into the Mac "preview" PDF viewer; you have to install Adobe Acrobat to read them. But Acrobat is free anyway so that isn't a problem.

There are equivalent programs for Mac, Linux, etc. - Macs save documents as PDFs anyway, but they come out as huge files so this isn't usually the best answer.

One thing to be careful of - If you create a PDF containing graphics it will store the full sized graphics files, even if you squash them small on the page. You can end up with teeny images that are still very slow to load. The best answer is to resample them to the right size in a paint program before putting them into the document.

Another problem that can happen is that fonts don't reproduce properly - the answer here is to embed the fonts into the PDF, which any PDF creator program should be able to do.

Here's a link to an RPG I publish that was created this way - there's a sample file of a few pages that's free to download, not very exciting in terms of layout etc. but I think it shows just how simple this stuff can be:

http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=ROW001

This was finished off using Adobe Acrobat Professional, incidentally, so will load into Mac preview without Actobat installed. But Acrobat Pro is hugely expensive.

Hope that this helps.

Forgot to add - try to avoid using Word to create HTML documents; it tries to micro-manage every letter on the page and you end up with huge and very slow-loading web pages.

The easiest way to create PDF-Files proabably is using a word processor and then using a tool to create the acrobat reader files - most of these programs create virtual printers for this purpose.

But there's one not so technical issue about all this. When you're talking about newsletter, I gather you mean using email to distribute it. In my experience, most users don't want mails with attachments to view in external viewers but rather a) open a link to a webpage or b) read directly in the mail client. This may be totally different for your subscribers and in the end PDF would be okay but don't dismiss this thought entirely.

So what I'm actually trying to say is that you should at least provide an immediate alternative to attaching PDF's as means of being user friendly.

Also while Ragtime or any other combinations like mentioned above are good ways for desktop publishing, have you thought about the technical means behind providing the newsletter itself? This is often the point where it becomes complicated (to inexperienced editors ). Here you'll have to decide which way to go - either you use a web-based software which often requires webspace with some kind of scripting language (Perl, PHP, ASP) or you use some desktop software which essentially works as a temporary mail server on your PC.


A lot of technical introduction may be requireable but the most professional way to combine content for a newsletter from different sources may be some kind of groupware tool or maybe even a content management system in order to publish these things on the web with only a few more clicks. In the end this might prove to be way too complicated and intense for your purposes but as you asked, an important part of creating a successful newsletter is gathering contents from different persons.

Bettina, my head is spinning already from all those technical terms in your message! You mind giving it to me again, in simpler words?

Hmmm, what about the kind of emails that's sent out by newspapers, you know, those weekly updates on movies/money/global news etc? Like the New York Times, or the Economist? How do these work?

Okay, let us do a three step program for your newsletter business

1.) Collect content for the newsletter. Will there be different writers/editors? If so, how are they delivering their content to you?

2.) Creating the newsletter by combining the content from 1.

3.) Sending it out to all subscribers.


Each of these tasks can be solved from completely professional to very simple. The important question is, how many time and effort you may want to spend on this. I know someone who does something similar for a living but also a guy who's just sending a simple weekly email to his fishing buddies In between, the possibilities are endless.

So before I hit you again with my technobabble, let us find a common ground first

It's never a good sign to preface this post with, "I'm not sure if this will be much help, but ... "

... I totally am! Apologies in advance if it's basically useless.

As a recent journalism grad and summer editor for the University of Kentucky's student-run newspaper, I've got quite a bit of experience in publications production and design. We use Macs for everything, including the Mac-based software QuarkXpress and sometimes Adobe InDesign to build our pages. It's relatively simple to just copy and paste text from a Word document into a text box and manipulate the type to get it to look like you want, along with any images, infoboxes, ads, etc. If you're using a Mac and are interested, there's a free Quark download available here .

After the page is designed, we use Adobe Distiller to save the file as a PDF, which is just a matter of clicking and dragging the file into the Distiller window.

To upload content onto the newspaper's Web site, we use College Publisher — it offers an easy-to-use format that works for Web masters and those with very little working knowledge of HTML (like me!) alike.

And, as far as design goes, the possibilities are pretty much unlimited. A striking masthead is key, as is clean, straightforward design. Eep, that's incredibly broad. I almost know I have a newsletter tutorial on file somewhere from a design class I took last semester. It has step-by-step instructions for building a newsletter, from the masthead to the headlines and text itself. If I can find it, would you be interested? If not, no worries! Just a thought.

The only problem is, the software I've mentioned can be pretty expensive. Have you thought about asking any students, faculty or staff in your university's communications department for some advice? They might be invaluable resources when it comes to getting free access to professional software.

Hope this helped in any way!

First off, I just want to thank everybody for all the help so far. You guys are the best!

Bettina, thanks for breaking it down for me? I shall try to answer the questions the best I can. Given that piggy-backed with every single answer is "I would be happy to learn about the better/more professional methods"

1) There will be different writers, but I am the only one who will be writting and editing. I had planned to just have them type up their articles on Word, then email them to me, along with any graphics/photos that they want with the article.

2) Haven't decided on the format. I could either do an entirely web-based version (like those email updates by newspapers/magazines), or have a pdf file to be placed on the website. For the latter, I can just email the pdf to the club webmaster. For the former, well, I'm not sure what I'd need to know. Let's just say my knowledge of webpages stops at viewing them. I know absolutely nothing about making them.

3) The club has a mailing list. I just thought to email everybody whenever there is a newsletter, or email them the intro page of the newsletter (one with all the headlines and links)

As for the software, I have Microsoft Publisher, and a friend has offered to lend me the Adobe equavalent (I think it's Pagemaker, but I'm not 100% sure). I think my friend has Dreamweaver as well.

angelic_editor, the step by step directions for building a newsletter would be great! If you can find it, please email it to meclone2@mailup.net

Okay meclone2, that's something we can work with.

First off the third point of action, distributing the newsletter is officially solved, as you already have a mailing list up and running. That's good because this solves one major problem

Now point 1 (gathering content) and point 2 (creating the newsletter) may - and in all likelihood will - interfere with each other. This means that based on some major decisions you may need to adapt on both accounts. Let me explain: the goal should be to take as little time as needed for you to create this newsletter but also as little knowledge as possible for each single writer while still reaching your goals.

The thing is, having a publishing software (like MS Publisher, Adobe Pagemaker or even free software like the mentioned RagTime) usually requires a certain amount of time to get to know the software and to get the results you desire. While it may be beneficial for the professional use if every author already submits his or her contents in the desired output-format, this can take a lot out of your volunteers.
My suggestion would be to simply use direct mail for distributing content in whichever format may be best for you creating the newsletter.

Now on to your hard work Being an editor, not of one text but of a complete newsletter, is a hard task. Without a doubt you will have the last shot at proofreading all contents, you need to decide what and how much of a topic is warranted for the newsletter and as this is a one (wo?)man job there's the whole technical hardship you need to learn.
You already mentioned the newsletter only being kind of a "linklist" to the website like newspapers/magazines handle this. This would indeed be a good way: by placing a headline with a few descriptive words and a link to the full-text version of a story, you get to place more content in less space. This way, a reader doesn't have to scroll for pages over boring content (a big plus, believe me) but can take a first look at all you have to offer. On the other hand, this also requires a certain backend on a website. Do you have this kind of webspace available, preferably with some script language available? The most economic way would be using a CMS (content management system); after setting it up, the task'd be reduced to adding a new article/page and then either importing data from a file or using a textarea with (format)features like offered by Microsoft Word.


That was probably a bit too specific again, sorry The thing is, that without some reasonable amount of time (and probably also money or at least effort, because using the right tools isn't always free) on your and the writer's part, most "professional" options are out of the picture. BUT this does not mean, that you cannot publish a professional looking newsletter and I think, this is more important than doing each step as it'd be done in business.
By using a website which is mainly being linked to, you can forget about worrying yourself about creating the perfect newsletter. Instead you require some basic knowledge on using a webbased interface and you should know how to work with a HTML-editor (like Dreamweaver).
You will also be offered many more features which may not be needed at all (ie a place to exchange yourselves in some kind of forum, which is obviously not needed if you've got a mailinglist; also this would offer a great platform for people outside your community/mailinglist).

I have nothing technical to add, but I just wanted to wish you best of luck!

That sounds like such a great learning and personal experience

I will send a party to cheer you on:

Bettina,

What do you mean by "webbased interface"?

Cheers,
meclone2

Well my suggestion would be to use some kind of content management system. Some of those allow you to format content in a WYSIWYG editor like you would in a real editor (wysiwyg = what you see is what you get - which basically means no requirement for knowing HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc).

An easier way would be to use any kind of blog-script or -website as this works basically the same way (by using a deeplink to each entry).

But back to your question of "webbased interface". With this I mean that you don't have to worry about HTML or constantly building webpages when you have new content but instead can use a script which takes care of this unnecessary work. How a CMS basically works, you can see in this screenshot . As you might see, you can edit the content and the CMS takes care of anything else.