I do a newsletter for a local wildlife refuge. The most time-consuming part of it is pasting articles from Word into CS4 and then reformatting them to my CS4 desired column widths.
Anyone have any tips and techniques for this? Please don't include suggestions to buy other sw such as InDesign, as I'm not there yet and I don't want to go there. It's a small newsletter (8-12 pages) that is published twice a year.
Arash,
That idea might just work. When you import a pdf into photoshop, it rasterizes it into an image. As long as you get the size right, then all you would need to do would be to select the background and clear it so any underlying photo could be seen. The downside is if you need to change any text, you mast start with the text editor, generate a new pdf and import that into phoshop again. But it would save all the formatting of text in photoshop.
Do you only have Photoshop CS4 or do you have Illustrator/acrobat too? If so, put the pdf in as a smart object, then it will remain editable through Illustrator or Acrobat. If you only have photoshop I'd do it the long tedious way the first time, save that as a template keeping each "section" of type as it's own layer. Then copy/paste into the desired layer the next time around.
Why are you using CS4 for what is a word processing job??
I don't have CS4 and may not understand your quandry but most word processing programs allow you to set column width etc and then you insert the image.
Word has a newsletter template that is editable and if you are using the Office suite, then Publisher will do the job also. I used to do a weekly in Publisher many years ago and had a template set up so it wasn't re inventing the wheel.
If you do not have a pdf conversion/creation program like Acrobat, there are many open source programs and will allow you to convert a Word document into a pdf as part of the "print" function
If you aren't into buying word processing software (it can be expensive) then there are several open source programs that are free for the download.
good luck-- they are a lot of work but can be a lot of fun also
For newsletters or client packets, I use Apple Pages. It has some great pre-designed templates that are very attractive. I also use Indesign for book layout, which is the defacto design/layout program.
Pages allows you to export your documents very easily into pdf options as well for download or emailing. Of course, you have to buy a mac... but that is a step up too:)
Not too long. I don't use it a lot - so I'm not nearly as comfortable with it as PS or Lightroom. But it is very powerful layout/design tool. Like Photoshop, there are multiple ways to do the same thing.