I like getting to play Dear Abby! Though lately my responses read less like sage advice and more like columns by The Non-Expert—only not funny. Yesterday Sarah wrote with some questions:
Since 2002, I have been editor for our local historical society’s 20-page quarterly. When I first started, I did it in an old version of WordPerfect and (you’ll laugh) actually cut and pasted together the booklet and took it to our local printer.
Then I got slightly more high tech and started producing PDFs from the WordPerfect files.
The next thing was a switch to the Atlantis program, which produces .rtf files, from which I made PDFs to send to our local printer.
So, I still have all the old .wpd and .rtf files.
The historical society is now interested in taking the old issues, indexing them, and publishing the old issues in books (putting several together per volume) or perhaps just putting the old issues online.
However, there is not much of a budget for new software. The new software would need to do indexing and be able to handle endnotes and read the old files.
I am looking at Serif Page Plus and SoftMaker’s TextMaker. Have you heard anything pro or con or about these programs?
As a side issue — I am also looking into producing Large Print versions of documents. It seems that there are all sorts of standards that different organizations have for producing large print books. Do you have any advice for what standard to use, and how to handle graphics for large print books (obviously the graphics need to be bigger, but I don’t know how much).
Continue reading “Big Is Beautiful” →
