I have started to produce a “newsletter” monthly for distribution at the monthly TUMS meeting. (Tulsa Users of Macintosh Society.) I “stole” the TUMS logo from the old web site (see at left), and had the newsletter printed at Staples the past 2 months.
However, we are working on a non-existant budget and I decided I need to add more flash AND reduce the cost. The first two months consisted exclusively of the UGAB discounts and the TUMS meeting calendar. This month I decided to use some material from UGNN and from the articles posted on the UGAB web site. (See that material here: <a href=”http://ugab.typepad.com/ugresources/”>http://ugab.typepad.com/ugresources/</a>)
This month I received quotes from Staples for color and for black and white copies. The color ones were greater than $3.60 a copy. (12 pages = 3 double sided pages) The black and white ones were quoted at just under a $1 a copy.
Create Booklet is Lion compatible and a free program from “The Kept Promise“. What it does is put a new item under the PDF button in the Print window. (Will work with Leopard and newer Mac OS.)
Print Dialog with Create Booklet installed
Once that is selected, a PDF document is created and opened in Preview.
Document in Preview Created with Create Booklet
Once in Preview, it is very easy to print to a duplex printer by telling it to do double sided copies. Since I do not have such a printer, I used my Epson ink jet to print the first page for the flash, then the 3rd and 5th page was printed on my Brother laser. I then stacked the pages together and printed the backs with pages 2, 4 and 6. Thus once folded I had a booklet.
As you can see from the above document, the pages are centered on a page and thus are actually shrunk more than necessary and there is a large margin at top and bottom. In the future, I will use a page setup for legal size page in my original program. (In this case Pages.) That will allow more content for the 12 – 16 pages.
I have chosen to distribute these at the meetings to give the membership additional reason to attend, but up to this point I have put them on my Dropbox account and allowed the members to download from there by sending them an email link.
I would like to see what you have to say about this strategy and about Create Booklet.
Create Booklet is available here: <a href=”http://thekeptpromise.com/FreeApps.php”>http://thekeptpromise.com/FreeApps.php</a>
While there, be sure to check out his photo editing application called PhotoDazzle: Beautifier. It is for sale via the Mac App store for $9.99 and looks like it would be useful for portrait photographers.
More details are here: <a href=”http://thekeptpromise.com/PhotoDazzle.html”>http://thekeptpromise.com/PhotoDazzle.html</a>
