If you really need DTP layouting functions, use a DTP product as word processors simply aren't flexible or precise enough in layout. I've been using [1]Serif in various forms to do this, on and off, for over 20 years.

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en/publisher/

Not available for my OS. No spreadsheet functionality. :(

I'd switch to the whole Affinity suite, [1]Affinity Publisher is quite impressive IMHO although it's probably the application I use least of all three so I may have missed something.

Still, worth it, doubly so if you wait for their regular half price offers (roughtly every half year :) ).

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/

If Libre Office can't do what you need, then you do need Serif Publisher, which may be more sane than Adobe Indesign, and is far better than MS Publisher. Even Pressworks on Win 3.x, NT 4,0 and XP was better than MS Publisher 20 years ago,

That makes me feel old, think the last time I used Serif was approaching 25 years ago. Glad to see it is still going as it was great software then and I still regularly groan at the limitations of Powerpoint whenever I want to layout larger blocks of text in it.

Fun fact: Affinity was an offshoot off Serif. They were just bought by Canva, but their roots are Serif.

I knew it was worth keeping the floppies for Ventura Publisher

Just do it in Excel.

...from [1]Tatsuo Horiuchi

[1] https://mymodernmet.com/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-spreadsheet-paintings/

I am not aware of any good publishing tools for general SOHO-level use.

MS Publisher is/was as awful as any other.

Nowadays we don't want page-based formats, we want e-documents that adapt to the phone/desktop/assistive presentation format. Web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox have pretty dam' good PDF export if we really want a non-volatile page-based e-copy, to print off as and when.

And we want to embed text, spreadsheets, presentations, even animations, inside each other without having to care a damn about formats and compatibility.

There are plenty of XML based "standards" and formats around for this sort of thing.

But competent toolsets? Fuck off, lusers! Grr!

Oh, somebody, please prove me wrong!

Will probably show up in the comments soon: try Affinity Publisher. It's stupidly fast, very flexible and young enough to still actually listen to users.

And available for a one of purchase for a major verion with often sales.

Let me know when they add spreadsheet functions, support for my desktop OS, and a libre license to ensure file format evergreening.

I'm not sure of the details of their file format, but for DTP you could always use Postscript. But if you can't run in even in a VM, then the point is moot. The last time I used it, was as PagePlus in a Windows VM because the printer only hat GDI drivers. It was worth this for the job at the time.

Which OS do you use? That could be anything from Linux to BSD to Solaris to BeOS to 1001 others...

TempleOS?

Maybe try it first before you comment on features you'd like? You can try it for free, it runs on Windows, MacOS and iPadOS and the license doesn't distinguish between the platforms either.

In addition, they are receptive to sane feature requests and they have a forum that's actually visited by staff, so try it.

You can always resume whinging later :).

The moral of this is, as usual, never doing anything on a computer with a Corporate Software, that may need to be done again in 10-20 years time. Neither shiould you expect to retrieve it and edit it from any time after saving it. That is, if you CAN retrieve it from a HDD/SSD/Cloud environment. Especially the Cloud. It can go away, or be corrupted in a nano-second.

You're right. I still keep a goose around for the feathers, but the ink is sometimes hard to get. And as backup I have some stone tablets and chisels.

I think the use of documented formats is not an unreasonable demand to make, that makes lock-in that bit more difficult. And by 'documented' I don' mean the steaming pile that MS produced so it could pretend to be open.

"but the ink is sometimes hard to get"

Not a problem. You can stew it up from iron filings and tannin. Oak galls are good for the latter. If you can't get iron filings visit your local blacksmith and sweep op some smithereens. Alternatively soot, gum and water.

I've been thinking about goose blood, but I then end up with a chicken and egg problem in the form of feathers and blood:

Sorry, must have been something I ate.

:)

I can see this being a quiller app in the future.

I still miss Pagemaker...

Sort of lives on in Zombie fashion as Adobe InDesign. Unfortunately they fudged / kludged ebook "creation" into InDesign and the result is often worse than Vellum. Should only be used to create layout for paper publishing. Libre Office is now better than Word 2003 / Word 2007 and MS Publisher was always junk compared to others. Calibre or Sigil for ebooks from LO Office Writer source. Edit odt, and an extra Save As in docx for Calibre. The LO Writer also produces PDF good enough for publishing, if the layout is achievable. Also HTML, though websites are more often via CMS now.

I preferred Xerox Ventura myself, particularly for longer documents such as writing user manuals; unfortunately Corel took it over and it never recovered.

These days I'm often using Visio for documents that need careful laying out, particularly as senior management seem to like flow charts!

yEd FTW.

It has a few quirks, but it doesn't hose your carefully laid out org chart if you cough in the wrong direction, unlike Visio.

TeX?

Yea I know. Only joking. It can produce beautiful results but …well …you know the rest

Quark ?

As with any such useful software that is threatened with extinction, get it while you can and make sure you have back copies of that software and the serial key to go with it.

Or just keep an old VM handy with those things installed.

I have used Publisher. Horrible as it is, it was the only way to get something done that was easily editable by end users once done. Made it a decade ago, they still use that file for a restaurant menu.

Word is a word processor.

Powerpoint is a presentation designer.

Publisher was a desktop publisher.

They are three entirely different pieces of software with three completely different purposes. Along with typesetting software, they are unique products.

I get abandoning Publisher (it was a backwards compatibility nightmare, not great and expensive), especially if it's not your core product, but it's ludicrous to assert the others are suitable substitutes. It's as bad as suggesting "just use Paint" when retiring a vector-based image editor, or similar.

Serif/Affinity or similar is the next closest thing that's not prohibitively expensive, or Scribus if you want open-source.

But Word as an alternative? Only if you're just printing up a poster for a village fete and have nothing else to hand.

I miss FrameMaker. At an early job we had it installed on Sun workstations for creating technical documentation, but it often got used outside office hours for creating flyers and posters (with the permission of management, who saw it as a way for us to expand our skills).

+1 for FrameMaker, the only DTP tool I've used that seemed to understand page layout properly.

Cost a packet though, and we only had limited licences (again on Sun workstations). I often had the job of kicking FlexLM up the backside when it had a sulk.

I also had a row with the management when PCs started to infect the workplace. "You should be using Word for documentation" "But the Engineers all have Sun workstations on their desks, only the managers have PCs with Solitaire, er I mean Word...".

I have produced whole books in Word. It works well if you use themes and styles consistently. You can create a table of contents automatically.

The only advantage I ever found in Publisher was that it had more pdf options.

I also produced book in Word, it was far from simple with loads of references and enormous footnotes, and a table spanning dozens of pages. Word worked fine. But to make the covers I needed something that had more fine control of text and more options for dealing with images.

I used to use Publisher for the odd thing but haven't touched it in 20+ years.

I did use a desktop publisher to do my final year thesis at university in 1988 because, at the time, word processors couldn't cope with all the layout functionality. But now, I fear such programs are a bit of an anachronism, with paperless being the norm.

DTP programs were also useful for such things as getting books ready for actual printing. But there just isn't enough typesetting control in MS Publisher. Book publishers use programs like Adobe Indesign, which aren't exactly simple to use.

Small companies, nonprofits and schools will be missing out I suspect. But tools like Canva can fill the gap.

Scribus is pretty good and will import publisher files, after a fashion. More importantly, it is FOSS and has an XML file format. https://www.scribus.net/

In my experience, Scribus fails to handle tables.

“The converted Word document will be optimized for text editing”

Since when was MS Word optimised for text editing? Or anything else come to that?

As for Power Point - probably the biggest time waster ever conceived. Except Jira of course

A number of local history group colleagues have used Word or one of the look-a-likes to produce A5 books in PDF form ready for the printer. Having then edited some of the out-or-print ones for our web-site I'm amazed that they haven't set the wrap for images but simply tabbed and spaced across or cropped images externally before inserting.

I'm currently working on my own book with LO using Lulu A5 Word template which sets the correct gutters etc. I looked at Scribus and decided it was easier to just use the word processor. Set wrapping, use tables, etc. The WP can look after cross-referencing of captions. WYSIWYG. Write the book as you'd like to read it.

One benefit of writing text and laying it out complete with maps and photographs means that the text can be written so as to place an image and its description on the same page or facing pages as far as possible. Thinking of the text, images and layout separately would, I think, make it a lot harder. Of course the coloured pencil wielders aren't going to concede that but as evidence I point to David Spiegelhalter's "The Art of Uncertainty". I don't think there's a single diagram whose description is in the same view - and the diagrams are often far too small even with a lot of white space on the page. It makes it a lot harder to read than it needed to be.

I have done a few books in A5 (and other) formats through Lulu. Accurate WYSIWYG view is essential if you are not to spend 10 years fighting the code so the PDF turns out right and text aligns properly with the piccies.

Also use LO. Positioning images can be a pig, as they can get lost and fail to be rendered, causing the whole thing to crash. Just you try finding a hidden image to remove it! Self-discipline essential. Indexing is an even worse pig, but then, so is everybody's.

Using Word, I was preparing an index of a book with many names: John Smith, Dave Evans, Sean Lafferty, etc. The Word indexer duly picked up the names as John Smith etc. Then a librarian colleague pointed out that names are conventionally indexed as Smith, John; Evans, Dave; and Lafferty, Sean.

It's not the first document format to be abandoned and it won't be the last. I used to have a dozen odd pieces of software for decoding all the odd document formats I was asked to deal with. Tracking down (e.g.) the format some farmer had sent his accounts in as (an ancient graphics program) could be kind of fun.

Libre Office Draw is what I've always used. I did conference posters, at not-quite-A0 size, over a decade ago, and was tech support when my wife needed the same a couple of years back.

They've even got text flowing within arbitrary shapes now (not that I ever wanted that...)

Can text flow across boxes/frames/shapes, so it sequences properly on a complicated page layout? This is one DTP function I desperately miss in general office apps.

Can do something by formatting text as columns and persuading it to flow around overlapping images, but still very limited.

Apparently [1]LO Writer can do that .

[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/Writer/162

Microsoft say "Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to _open or edit_ Publisher files in Publisher".

You'd think they'd at least be able to manage a viewer. If you are a organisation with a lot of Publisher documents, basically you are f***ed. Definitely the "Extinguish" phase of Microsoft's MO :-(

I only use Publisher once a year... I create the programme for an amateur musical theatre group's annual production. Doing that in Word would be an absolute nightmare!

For a start, in Publisher you can edit a 2-page spread and have a photo that spans across both pages. As far as I'm aware, that's not (easily or accurately) possible in Word or PowerPoint.

I guess come 2026 I may need to look into some of the suggestions given here (I've already bookmarked Affinity).

Maybe give Scribus a try. Scribus is pretty good and will import publisher files, after a fashion. More importantly, it is FOSS and has an XML file format. https://www.scribus.net/

Apart from Word and Excel, MS apps are not serious products. Publisher has already changed once, with the new version not able to open the old version's saved files. Personally I like to think that I'll be able to come back to things I've saved and reuse them. It is one of the great benefits of open source that this sort of thing doesn't tend to happen.