Newsletter Publishing

From MissionTechWiki

What is Newsletter Publishing?

It is the act of publishing a newsletter, either in print or via email. It may be performed by individual missionaries or offices, with audiences from 5 people up to thousands.

The contents of Newsletters vary from missionary to missionary, but generally contains information about events that are happening to the missionary, such as Furlough, family issues and events "on the field".

Available tools

Office Tools

If you have any details of tools used by Offices for publishing mass newsletters, please list them here

Tools for individual missionaries

Microsoft Publisher If you've already got Microsoft Office installed on your computer, you might already have Microsoft Publisher. This is a great Desktop Publishing (DTP) program and is reasonably easy to learn and use, but not many print houses will use its default output format.

Ragtime Solo is/was a nice product, but the free version doesn't have spell checking, so you need to check the articles by hand or in another program first and then cut and paste it into ragtime. It looks like they have discontinued the free Ragtime Solo, but you might find it on the net. I found one copy for Windows here.

Scribus is a really good Desktop Publishing program written for the Linux platform. Some have said that it is so good that they have installed cygwin to run it on Windows. For windows instructions, see this article on the scribus website Scribus on Windows

PDF Creator is a very useful tool for publishing anything to PDF in Windows. It appears as a printer in windows and creates a PDF file when you print something to it.

OpenOffice.org is a free office suite that is sometimes used to create newsletters because of its integrated PDF creation. Many missionaries email PDF's as their personal newsletter. However, OpenOffice Writer, like Microsoft Word, is designed more for word processing than for desktop publishing, so is often difficult to manage.

Sending Newsletters

Email

Missionaries often have the opportunity of sending their newsletters as emails. This is a lot more convenient and cheaper than sending them by regular mail, and provides a near-instant delivery to the supporter.

When sending newsletters via email, the newsletters can be sent in the following formats:

• Microsoft Word document: The newsletter would be created in Microsoft Word, saved as a word document and then attached directly to an email to be sent.
  • Pros:
    • Simple for missionary
  • Cons:
    • Requires all recipients to have the Microsoft Word program installed on their computer
• Microsoft Publisher: Great program for laying out and designing a newsletter. Contains many features and benefits
  • Pros:
    • Easy to use
  • Cons:
    • Expensive
    • Not included in standard packages of Microsoft Office
    • Almost guaranteed not to be installed on recipient's machines!
• PDF document: Using the previously mentioned PDF Creator, the newsletter would be created in any program the missionary wishes to use (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, ...) and then printed to the PDF printer. This results in a PDF document file, which would then be attached directly to an email to be sent.
  • Pros:
    • Works cross platform (Mac, Linux, Windows)
    • Can be a smaller file if Screen resolution (75 dpi) chosen as output resolution
    • Can be read using the free Adobe Acrobat reader program obtained from here
  • Cons:
    • Requires Adobe Acrobat reader to be installed on the recipient's machine (but the program is free!)

Original page: http://www.missiontech.info/wiki/Newsletter_Publishing
from the MissionTech Wiki created by the International Conference on Computers and Missions