Read all about it; Publishing a newsletter: Part II. (Office Technology).

Last time we started to discuss the process of putting out a professional looking newsletter. If you missed the last column, it hit on the highlights of building an editorial team, and deciding the editorial direction that your newsletter should take. It also touched on applications that can be used to format the newsletter.

For some organizations, the templates that are provided in a high-end word processor, such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect, are sufficient to give a simple newsletter the basic format that it needs to look professional.

For an even more professional looking newsletter, you'll need a desktop publishing application. There are a number of well-known high-end programs, including QuarkXPress, PageMaker, and InDesign. Last column discussed Microsoft's Publisher 2002, an affordable $129 alternative. In addition to coordinated design sets, which match fonts, colors, and lay-outs, a desktop publishing application provides two other features that are essential for doing a professional looking page layout.

The first of these is a process that production professionals call kerning. Kerning is the process of adjusting the space between adjacent characters. Mono-spacing puts the., same amount of space between each and every character. Unfortunately, this gives a very typewriter-looking effect to the text.

Kerning provides a differing amount of space, measured in a printer's measurement called a pica, between different shapes of characters. Two round characters, like a "c" followed by an "o" will have a different amount of space between them than the same "c followed by an "1". Even word processors perform rudimentary kerning, generally using special tables of characters called kerned pairs.

Automatic kerning works fine until you need to copy fit text into a specific area. When laying out a document on a page, sometimes the story "almost" fits, you can edit out some text, but many document lay-out professionals simply tighten up the kerning.

The manual control over kerning. that a desktop publishing program provides also is essential when the automatic kerning function produces a layout that simply doesn't look right. Most often, this happens when mixing fonts in a line of text, perhaps intermixing normal text with italics. Manually kerning the text can restore a natural flow to the text.

The second feature that a desktop publisher provides, which is essential to longer documents, is something called folioing. When printing on a device other than a single page letter-sized printer, it is necessary to adjust the order in which pages are printed so that they line up correctly.

For example, if you print a four-page newsletter on a single sheet of 11 x 17-inch paper, and fold it in half, you want the result to be page one, page two, etc. To accomplish this, you have to print page four on the left side of the top of the 11 x 17 inch sheet, with page one on the right side. On the bottom of the sheet, when it is flipped over (duplexed in the printer), you need to print page two on the left side of the sheet, and page three on the right side.

So for correct printing of a four page newsletter on a single duplexed sheet of 11 x 17-inch paper, the pages in the document need to be arranged in the order page 4, page one, page two, and page three. This arrangement is called a folio. When creating a larger document, with more than four pages, or when the print device uses larger. sheets of paper, which are printed, cut, then folded, the folio process gets even a bit more complex.

A desktop publisher lets you create a folio simply by dragging and dropping thumbnail images of each page on a print order screen. Then, when the pages are printed, they will be in the correct order to easy assemble the publication.

Lots of output options

Once you've gotten your newsletter all laid Out, it's time to print it. How this is handled depends on several things. The first is the length of your newsletter. Is it a single page? One sheet printed on both sides? A multiple page self-mailer?

The next thing that needs to be factored into the print decision is how many copies you will need. If you are printing a limited number of copies of a one or two page newsletter that you can staple at the edge and fold into an envelope or self-mail, you can probably get away printing the newsletter on a moderately fast office inkjet printer. A more complex newsletter, such as one that is printed on 11 x 17- inch paper, folded, and saddle-stapled, usually requires a different print method.

Print volume is also a very important factor. At some point, which varies depending upon how much work you want to perform in-house, it simply makes more sense to outsource the printing of your newsletter to a commercial printer. In this scenario, you provide the printer with a formatted disk or CD-R with the newsletter laid out for them using the "output for printer" option that most desktop publishing programs offer. The printer will then print it on an offset press and bind or staple it for you.

Deciding when it makes more sense to outsource the printing also hinges on what type of printers you have available in your organization. For example, a number of printers are very useable for printing different kinds and volumes of newsletters.

An inexpensive printer, in terms of acquisition cost, is a Hewlett Packard DeskJet 1220c. This is a wide-format color ink jet printer that can handle 11 x 17-inch tabloid-size paper. It has a photo-quality print mode with excellent resolution for printing photos or other graphics. This printer costs about $400 and can print several letter-sized color pages per minute (ppm) in good quality, about 1.5 letter-sized ppm in "best" quality (which is what you would want for a newsletter), and print one side of a tabloid "B" size 11 x 17-inch page in about three minutes. For 10 copies of a one, two or four page newsletter, this printer would be fine, though ink use would run up the cost of printing quite a bit.

A better printer for letter-sized newsletters would be the Xerox Phaser 860 that's connected to a network. This printer uses plastic crayon-like ink sticks, with superb output quality, a built-in duplexer that turns a printed page over so that the back of the sheet can be printed, and can churn out full color pages at 10 ppm (or 5 ppm if you are printing both sides of the sheet).

At $3,400 for the model that provides duplexing and built-in Ethernet, it's not cheap. And it doesn't handle oversize "B" paper. But load up the two paper drawer with 1,000 sheets of paper, and you can really grind Out 1,000 full-color great looking newsletters printed on the front and back of a page in just a few hours. With a duty cycle of 65,000 pages per month, and much lower per page print costs than the inkjet, this is a great way to go for many offices.

A third printer is the new Lexmark 910C tabloid-sized color printer. That's the one in the photo, with six-foot tall Scott standing next to it to provide scale. It weighs almost 300 pounds with the cabinet that it is sitting on, and costs a minimum of $3,999.

It can, however, spew out standard letter size pages in monochrome or color at up to 28 ppm. With a typical newsletter style format, the print speed should average upwards of 20 pages per minute, or at least 10 pages per minute if you use the duplexer to print on both sides.

Printing double-sided 11 x 17-inch pages, the C910C slows down a bit, but still manages to print three or four 11 x 17-inch densely populated pages per minute. That translates to more than 200, 4-page 8.5 x 11 inch newsletters an hour. Obviously, the Lexmark C910c can also serve as a general purpose office printer. Unless you intend to print a lot of newsletters every month, it hardly makes sense to purchase the printer solely for that purpose.

Hopefully, these columns have helped you get moving on the task of creating, or redesigning your organization's newsletter. One last word of advice, however. In the end, it's not really how good the newsletter you create looks. The real measure of how successful you are lies in whether the recipient reads your newsletter, and finds that it serves its purpose, whether that be informative, entertaining, or both.