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Before You Buy Home Publishing Software

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Consumer desktop publishing software or creative printing products are geared to non-designers. These products are usually low cost, easy to use, and come bundled with clip art, fonts, and craft templates. With some exceptions, this software lacks the ability to produce output in a format suitable for commercial printing.

General Purpose

These programs do it all. Filled with templates or design wizards, clip art, and fonts these packages create a wide range of projects including cards, scrapbooks, banners, and photo albums. Some software may have templates for SOHO businesses including business cards and brochures. Photo-editing utilities, word processing, and commercial printing options are sometimes part of the package.

Calendar Creation

The main purpose of these products is creating calendars of all shapes and sizes. Some programs feature appointment scheduling and planning tools while others may be simply for printing calendars by the day, by the week, by the month, or by the year.

Greeting Card Design

You can make a greeting card with most any general purpose home publishing software but these card programs feature thousands of ready-made templates, design wizards, clip art, fonts, or other extras specifically for cards, announcements, or invitations.

T-Shirt Design / Iron-on Transfers

These programs designed specifically for creating personalized t-shirt designs and similar projects include templates, clip art, and often come packaged with extras such as transfer paper samples or even t-shirts or other objects to accept your iron-on transfer designs.

Digital Scrapbooking

Digital scrapbooking can be considered a type of desktop publishing. It's the process of combining text and graphics into page layouts -- in this case, scrapbook pages. Digital scrapbooking software lets you take transfer traditional scrapbooking techniques to your computer and usually comes with layouts, templates, and graphics typically used in scrapbooking.

Newsletter Creation

Newsletters don't have to be for-profit publications. Individuals often create family newsletters. You might design a newsletter for your club or school. Small business owners often publish newsletters as a marketing and public relations tool for their customers. Choose a program that can handle the planned length of your newsletter. If you can, find out what kind of templates it offers. Some software has newsletters tailored to specific industries and purposes that can help jumpstart your newsletter creation.

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