I have been tasked by my non-profit organization to develop some marketing brochures. I have zero experience in doing this. Which LO application is best for doing this and where do I go for a tutorial and assistance?
Thank you,
Abe
Without a description of the ultimate goal it is hard to give a definitive answer.
I would rule out Impress because impress is intended for presentations, i.e. every page is independent from each other, though sharing the same structure/lay out.
If the document is equivalent to a text to be read from start to end, Writer can be used.
For a more graphics-oriented document, Draw could be used, where text is limited to labelling drawings. But if text is more important, you’ll hit limitations in formatting (Draw is not user-friendly when it comes to heavily format paragraphs).
A marketing brochure in my understanding mixes text and images and shows several non necessarily related topics. If this doesn’t fit in the “text flow” model (a text to be read as a whole), i’d recommend a page-oriented application (desktop publishing) where pages or parts of pages are considered unrelated documents. One such DTP free and open application is Scribus.
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If you are using a commercial printer and you have coloured background or images that go to the edge of the paper then you will need a program that will allow for bleed. Bleed is effectively another few millimeters (around 1/8 inch) beyond the page edge that is printed and then cropped off. There is not support for this in LibreOffice although there is an extension for Draw that attempts to emulate this.
Having said that, I have done layout in LibreOffice, exported to pdf and then added the edge images and background in Adobe Illustrator ($$$) without much extra effort. I found that Scribus did not support this approach
Starting in Scribus would have a steeper learning curve but might be worth the effort. There are some good tutorials around
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You have answered my question. I guess I will look to Scribus for a solution. Indeed, the marketing doc would be heavy in graphics with bullet-style text. We would have our logo, and a colorful background to make it attractive.
Thank you very much.
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I think this article will help you:
Layout in Writer
If you have detailed questions about this, please report back here. Thank you.
Here you can find flyers created with Draw (Examples):
Flyers Gallery
IMHO, I would not use Impress for this.
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