I have to put together a monthly newsletter as a requirement for a client and its annoying as shit. Any recommendations on a good free or cheap tool to do this? It doesnt need to be published online and its not mass mailed or printed. Just sent to client as a PDF for him to distribute via email as needed. Been using my own template created in Word and it works ok but figured I would take 5 min to see if anyone knew of something else to use... thanks

7/1/2013 12:28:34 PM

if the goal is to keep the workflow as simple as possible, rather than emailing a pdf, why not save the file as html and then use the "save and send as email" feature in word and just email to a mailing list. If you don't have one, there are a ton of services out there. I'm not up on a lot of mailing list products but I know you can use this one for free http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ up to 1gb/1000 emails per month

7/1/2013 12:33:07 PM

the contract (and therefore the client) states that it has to be a PDF sent directly to one particular person who then does whatever he wants with it. Its not a mass market newsletter or anything. Just more of a "progress this month" newsletter that he sends out to various stakeholders as he sees fit.

7/1/2013 12:55:05 PM

What do you want input about? How to automatically populate the form? Or how to make the form? Because if I am doing it monthly I would just use a Word template and export as a .pdf to email, or save one as a PDF form and fill out the PDF each month. But I'm not sure what you are asking.

7/1/2013 1:37:44 PM

not seeing how to do this any better unless the content can be programmatically collected, in which case you're writing something yourself.

7/1/2013 1:40:12 PM

^^ which is what I am doing...

I was basically looking for the pdf equivalent of all the "DIY, no html needed" basic website design blog sites out there. Its not in me to provide the same thing each month with just new texts so I am cosntantly having to resize text boxes, pick new borders, etc month to month and I would love some sort of drag and drop thing... hard to explain, but as I said, picture those really basic blog sites and how they let people pick different templates and then drop in a pic, or text, etc. and picture a pdf producing version of that

7/1/2013 3:51:11 PM

Quote :

"I would love some sort of drag and drop thing..."

You mean like Word

7/1/2013 4:13:01 PM

^

7/1/2013 5:34:23 PM

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/results.aspx?qu=newsletter&ex=2&av=zwd150

7/1/2013 6:04:55 PM

^^^ no, I already mentioned I am currently using that, but thanks for commenting after not even reading what you are commenting on...

7/1/2013 6:53:33 PM

you could try InDesign

7/1/2013 7:43:41 PM

Quote :

"no, I already mentioned I am currently using that"

7/2/2013 9:41:59 AM

Are you trying to learn InDesign or Publisher or something? Because what you are doing now with Word is the easiest way to do this, just download different templates.

7/2/2013 10:33:07 AM

^^ oh boy, you got me, you totally BURNED me in my legitimate search for help, glad you feel so much better after doing that.

^ maybe, I will check them out, and I am well aware of the templates in Word but was just seeing if there was a really really specific tool out there rather than using a template in a all encompassing, general word processing program. Like maybe something where you enter the various articles or stories, pics, etc. and it automatically generates the optimal configuration or layout based on the length of each write up, pic size, topics, etc. Its a very minor (but still required) task and its annoying to have to constantly resize text boxes, move shit around, work with margins, bring shit to the foreground or background, figure out how to avoid blank spaces on a page etc.



[Edited on July 2, 2013 at 10:51 AM. Reason : d]

7/2/2013 10:47:24 AM

try Scribus

7/4/2013 10:31:54 PM

Thanks, will check it out

7/5/2013 12:04:22 AM