[victor]

Hello, I'm looking for opinions on which software is best for a small (only maybe one-two page to begin with) school newspaper. Preferably, I'd like something that could easily be switched to online format for archival, and bulletin board areas.

Is there one piece of software I could find that could do both online and print versions of the same newspaer, or would you all recommend two different pieces and just do a lot of cut and pasting?

Any help would be great!

Victor Wandres

[andi*pandi]

Well...
Theoretically both Quark and PageMaker (not sure about InDesign) can export to HTML. However, it pretty much sucks and only ends up being plain text. Perhaps InDesign and GoLive will be better intertwined.

Of course, you could just post Adobe Acrobat PDF's of your newsletter online, and thereby maintain the appearance...

Stay AWAY!!! from Microsoft Publisher--it is evil.

[tonymac]

Adobe PageMaker is still the standard in newspaper publishing and Quark Xpress still dominates the color printing world. (And MS Publisher is a joke). If you want your students to get experience with professional software that will help them if they decide to do this as a career, then go with PageMaker or Quark. Adobe has much friendlier academic pricing. You should be able to get an educational copy of PageMaker for a couple hundred dollars. As andi*pandi suggested, publishing online with PDF files is the best way to preserve your formatting.

[Bockie]

I am in the graphics design/marketing industry and agree with the previous posts. In high school, our journalism class used PageMaker and I still use the training that it provided.

Another suggestion if you are on a tight budget would be to use *GASP* MS Word. Many firms use Word as a standard for office word processing @$&*(monopoly)@$#*@$ and businesses look for students who have computer skills. Word will give a more direct HTML conversion, but it is a confusing code to decipher if a student is into computer programming.

My recommendation would be to use Word. There are a wider range of businesses that use the program. I wager that few of the students would actually use PageMaker, Quark, or Acrobat on a daily basis. I hope this helps!

[victor]

Wow!

Thanks for all the suggestions!

I think I may have given some of you the wrong idea though. I am just a Second year law student who wants to start a small bi-weekly newspaper with some of my friends and their spare time. I need something that is _simple_ to use, nothing that will take much more brain power than normally using a mac.

With this in mind, would all your suggestions on software remain the same?

Thanks again,
Victor

[Bockie]

Go with Word 98 (or 01 when it comes out). The software has a simple interface that will be familiar to anyone and it can be used cross-platform if you add the .doc or .html extention. I hope this helps!