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!
