Bob
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.

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