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Question

need software rec/what does publishing software do?

Nov 12, 2014 1:40PM PST

Greetings,
I am working on a project, and I software beyond MS Word.
I have a large collection of my father's letters he wrote and received during WWII. I am going to scan them all in, along with pictures and military documents, and have it bound into a book(s) to give to several family members. Some of the letters are written on Air Mail, some onion skin, there are several postcards, but most are on paper that looks to be 5x8. Clearly, making each letter readable, regardless of size or medium, is a goal. I am looking for software that would treat the scanned letter as a picture, and let me enlarge it, darken it, and move it around the "page." Let me give an example why that is important: for letters not sent/received from immediate family members, I want an image of the envelope with the return address arranged artfully on the same page (if the letter is an a small sheet of paper), so that the sender is identified. Also, there are several "loose" things amongst this bundle of letters, such as newspaper clippings, telegrams, etc. that I want to arrange artfully on pages.

Clearly, this is beyond MSWord. Since I am ultimately going to send this off to be bound, I see that several publishing websites have software for books. But I need a bit of graphic control, and I'm not sure if they do anything besides manipulate text. So I put it out to CNET: knowing what you do of my project, can you think of a good software program, one that ultimately can be saved as a Word or .pdf doc? And second, has anyone ever used self-publishing software, and if so, what can it do for me?

I apologize for the long post. Thank you so much in advance.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
So DTP?
Nov 12, 2014 9:01PM PST
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing is a start but I find many folk irritated over the work involved in learning the app or the time it takes to scan, organize, digitize and create the work in question. That is, I've been asked many times why software can't do "this." Well it can, we get to collect the source, digitize and then craft each page in our choice of app. It's far from automatic.
Bob
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Answer
lots of software
Nov 13, 2014 5:03AM PST

There are lots of software that will do what you want to do. You can even use a good digital camera with a good lighting setup and take great pictures of the documents instead of scanning.

no matter what you do, when you start enlarging, you will lose quality.

some software that will do what you want includes photoshop elements, photoshop, gimp (free), and others. You can check cnet's download.com for different photo editing software though I would recommend going to the software publishers website and download it from there. One thing though, once you get the photos edited, you should still use ms word for the actual pages or even use ms publisher even if converting to a pdf file.