The Rookie

[woody649]

That would be me. I just discovered this place, and I hope to be able to both learn a bit and, eventually, contribute a bit.

I'm officially an Olde Pharte. I'm an architect, semi-retired, widowed. A long time ago I was Shanghaied into being the editor-in-chief of the quarterly newsletter for a small non-profit organization. That was my introduction to desktop publishing. My predecessor had worked in the public relations department of a large corporation, and he produced the newsletters the old-fashioned way -- printing proof copies and blue penciling the corrections. I didn't have that luxury -- I had a computer, and I had a laser printer, so I had to make it work.

I discovered a wonderful DTP program called Publish-It!, put out by a company called Timeworks. Sadly, the program and the company no longer exist, and I am still searching for an affordable DTP program that's as easy to use and as capable as that old program (which dates back to the days of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 -- even if I had the original diskettes, the program wouldn't run under Windows 10).

So here I am, trying to become a self-published author and wanting to be able to do a bit better than formatting a book of several hundred pages in Microsoft Word. I've been away from DTP for at least twenty years, so I have a lot of catching up to do.