Create stunning documents with iStudio Publisher. Powerful and intuitive page layout software for desktop publishing. Designed exclusively for Mac.
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InDesign is a professional-level desktop publishing software for Windows and Mac that was first produced by Adobe Systems in 1999. InDesign is the heir of Adobe PageMaker and can be used to publish every sort of editorial product (particularly books, magazines, and journals). The most basic, art-centered desktop publishing programs tend to sell for as little as $35 while the more business-centered software is usually around $150. Some professional programs, like Adobe InDesign, are subscription based and cost about $20 a month.
Featured by Apple in ‘Apps for Designers’, iStudio Publisher is perfect for designing anything you want to layout and print, and comes with world class support.
Join over a quarter of a million users and design, enjoy, and smile!
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Why Choose iStudio Publisher?
Produce beautiful, professional quality documents with ease, including newsletters, brochures, adverts, flyers, invitations, menus, reports, posters, greetings cards, and yearbooks.
Start with a professionally designed template or a blank document of any size.
Who’s Using iStudio Publisher?
Anyone can master iStudio Publisher quickly, regardless of age and experience.
New to page layout and desktop publishing? Our Video Tutorials and Rapid Start Guide will get you up to speed.
Experienced? You’ll love iStudio Publisher’s sophisticated features.
iStudio Publisher in Education
Are you a student? Do you work in education?
Get 40% discount on single licenses from our webstore.
We also offer an Educational Volume Licensing Scheme for schools, colleges and universities.
Great Looking Page Layout
All text, images and visual effects are held within shapes. Create, combine and style your shapes to achieve great looking documents with ease.
Show Me How.
Toolkit
Use the Toolkit for creating, editing and laying out document content, including shapes, text and images, via direct interaction with your mouse.
Shape Library
A wide selection of pre-designed shapes for quick results, arranged in seven groups. Also draw your own shapes using the comprehensive range of drawing tools.
Inspectors
The Inspectors are organized in a separate window and provide a control panel from which to manage your document and apply style settings to shapes, text and images.
Snap Grid
Use the fully adjustable snap grid to help with sizing and aligning shapes. There are independent controls to show or hide the grid and turn the snap-to-grid function on/off.
Rulers
Horizontal and vertical rulers that auto-scale and auto-label. Click the drop-down control where the rulers meet to choose between millimetres, inches, inches (decimal) and points.

Canvas
The canvas is working space next to the document pages/spreads, which isn’t printed or exported. It’s a convenient place for storing alternative content to swap in/out.
Toolbar
The toolbar gives you an easy-to-access, duplicate set of controls for the most frequently used menu items. In many cases a keyboard shortcut is also provided.
Document Viewing
Open multiple windows on the same document, with independent zoom and view settings, all live. Show or hide a Thumbnails Navigator. Smooth pan and zoom up to 5000%.
Viewing Options
Choose to show or hide grid lines, text wrap runarounds, text baselines, glyph bounding boxes, and invisible flow items. Optionally work in live preview mode.
Spread Editing
iStudio Publisher supports true spread editing, allowing you to lay out two pages next to each other and create content ‘across the fold’. Ideal for brochures and newsletters.
Master Pages
Simple Desktop Publishing Software For Mac And Pc
Master pages are for holding repeating content you want to include on multiple pages, for example, headers and footers. Automatic page numbering is included.
Drawing Shapes
Easily draw shapes from scratch using the four drawing tools. Create sophisticated lines with the Multi-Line Tool. Choose from seven line segment types.
Adjusting Shapes
Use the Reshaping Tool to adjust the geometry of Library shapes and shapes drawn from scratch. Simply reposition the control points (orange) and Bezier handles (purple).
Text Columns
Place text columns in any shape. Easily change the number of columns, column spacings (gutter widths) and inset distance within the shape.
Text Flow Linking
Create flow links between any combination of text columns and paths, and over different pages or spreads. Useful for splitting an article between non-adjacent columns.
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Text Wrapping
Wrap text around any shape (image) and adjust the offset distance. Choose between a tight wrap that follows a shape’s contour, or a box wrap around a bounding rectanglar.
Text Around Curves
Write text along curved line paths, around shapes, and at any angle. Applies to shapes from the Shape Library and to those drawn with the drawing tools.
Text Layout
Adjust paragraph alignment, justification, and indents. Set line and paragraph spacings to auto-scale or fixed values. Add tab stops. Fine- tune character spacing (tracking).
Text Styling
Use any font installed on your Mac. Apply text effects: bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, outline and shadow. Stretch text non-proportionally.
Photos and Images
Insert a wide range of image types including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, PSD, PDF, EPS and AI. Images are stored at their original resolution to achieve maximum print quality.
Image Layout
Comprehensive scaling and fitting options (within any shape), including tile and tile rotate. Change image DPI, and align, flip and rotate images within shapes.
Colors
Choose colors for text, lines, fills and shadows via the standard Mac OS X Color panel. Capture monitor colors and save favorites to a swatch table. Design in RGB or CMYK colors.
Shadows
Add shadows to shapes, lines, images and text. Adjust the offset angle, offset distance, color, blur and opacity. Reducing an object’s opacity reduces its shadow weight.
Opacity
Adjust the opacity of shapes, lines, color fills, images and text. Use partial opacity gradient fills as masks. Combine shapes of partial opacity to create interesting effects.
Grouping Shapes
Group shapes together to enable them to be selected as a single unit for repositioning, resizing, rotating or copying. Nested grouping is supported to any level.
Bulleted and Numbered Lists
Create bulleted and numbered lists by using a combination of tab stops and paragraph indent settings. Choose any Unicode symbol as a bullet character.
Compatibility and Sharing
iStudio Publisher document files are XML based. Paste in RTF styled text. Print documents directly or export as PDF, EPUB (text only) or RTF format files.
Printing Booklets
Create a multi-page booklet from several sheets of paper printed on both sides and folded in half. The page imposition (reordering for printing) is handled for you.
Commercial Printing
Produce PDF files ready for printing at a commercial print shop, satisfying all of the typical requirements, including high resolution images, CMYK colors and embedded fonts.
Auto Save
A copy of your document is automatically saved every 5 minutes, without interrupting you. NOTE: This is not an implementation of the Mac OS X Auto Save and Versions feature.
Help Pages
Comprehensive Help pages presented in the standard Mac OS X Help Viewer. Includes context sensitive Help – click a question mark to go straight to a relevant Help page.
Desktop publishing (also known as DTP) is the creation of documents using page layoutsoftware on a personal computer.
The term has been used for publishing at all levels, from small-circulation documents such as local newsletters to books, magazines and newspapers. However the term implies a more professional-looking end result, with a more complex layout, than word processing, and so when introduced in the 1980s was often used in connection with homes and small organisations who could not previously produce publication-quality documents themselves.
History[change | change source]
Desktop publishing began in 1985 with the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout program, which ran on the original 128K Macintosh computer. The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the AppleLaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software.
Before the advent of desktop publishing, the only option available to most persons for producing typed (as opposed to handwritten) documents was a typewriter, which offered only a handful of typefaces (usually fixed-width) and one or two font sizes. Indeed, one popular desktop publishing book was actually titled The Mac is not a typewriter.[1] The ability to create WYSIWYG page layouts on screen and then print pages containing text and graphical elements at crisp 300 dpi resolution was revolutionary for both the typesetting industry and the personal computer industry. Newspapers and other print publications made the move to DTP-based programs from older layout systems in the 1980s.
The term 'desktop publishing' is attributed to Aldus Corporation founder Paul Brainerd,[2] who sought a marketing catch-phrase to describe the small size and relative affordability of this software in contrast to the expensive commercial phototypesetting equipment of the day.
Behind-the-scenes technologies developed by Adobe Systems set the foundation for professional desktop publishing applications. Although Macintosh-based systems would continue to dominate the market, in 1986, the GEM-based Ventura Publisher was introduced for MS-DOS computers. While PageMaker's pasteboard metaphor closely simulated the process of creating layouts manually, Ventura Publisher automated the layout process through its use of style sheets. This software automatically generated indices and other body matter. This made it suitable for manuals and other long-format documents.
During its early years, desktop publishing acquired a bad reputation as a result of untrained users who created poorly-organized layouts — similar criticism would be levied again against early Web publishers a decade later. However, some were able to realize truly professional results.
Terminology[change | change source]
There are two types of pages in desktop publishing, electronic pages and virtual paper pages to be printed on paper. All computerized documents are technically electronic, and are limited in size only by computer memory or computer data storage space.
Virtual paper pages will ultimately be printed, and therefore require paper parameters that coincide with international standard physical paper sizes such as 'A4,' 'letter,' etc., if not custom sizes for trimming. Some desktop publishing programs allow custom sizes designated for large format printing used in posters, billboards and trade show displays. A virtual page for printing has a predesignated size of virtual printing material and can be viewed on a monitor in WYSIWYG format. Each page for printing has trim sizes (edge of paper) and a printable area if bleed printing is not possible as is the case with most desktop printers.
A web page is an example of an electronic page that is not constrained by virtual paper parameters. Most electronic pages may be dynamically re-sized, causing either the content to scale in size with the page or causing the content to re-flow.
Master pages are templates used to automatically copy or link elements and graphic design styles to some or all the pages of a multipage document. Linked elements can be modified without having to change each instance of an element on pages that use the same element. Master pages can also be used to apply graphic design styles to automatic page numbering.
Page layout is the process by which the elements are laid on the page orderly, aesthetically, and precisely. Main types of components to be laid out on a page include text, linked images that can only be modified as an external source, and embedded images that may be modified with the layout application software. Some embedded images are rendered in the application software, while others can be placed from an external source image file. Text may be keyed into the layout, placed, or (with database publishing applications) linked to an external source of text which allows multiple editors to develop a document at the same time.
Graphic design styles such as color, transparency, and filters, may also be applied to layout elements. Typography styles may be applied to text automatically with style sheets. Some layout programs include style sheets for images in addition to text. Graphic styles for images may be border shapes, colors, transparency, filters, and a parameter designating the way text flows around the object called 'wraparound' or 'runaround.'
Comparisons[change | change source]
With word processing[change | change source]
While desktop publishing software still provides extensive features necessary for print publishing, modern word processors now have publishing capabilities beyond those of many older DTP applications, blurring the line between word processing and desktop publishing.
In the early days of graphical user interfaces, DTP software was in a class of its own when compared to the fairly spartan word processing applications of the time. Programs such as WordPerfect and WordStar were still mainly text-based and offered little in the way of page layout, other than perhaps margins and line spacing. On the other hand, word processing software was necessary for features like indexing and spell checking, features that are common in many applications today.
As computers and operating systems have become more powerful, vendors have sought to provide users with a single application platform that can meet all needs.
With other electronic layout software[change | change source]
The key difference between electronic typesetting software and DTP software is that DTP software is generally interactive and WYSIWYG in design, while other electronic typesetting software requires the user to enter the processing program's markup language without immediate visualization of the finished product. This kind of workflow is less user-friendly than WYSIWYG, but more suitable for conference proceedings and scholarly articles as well as corporate newsletters or other applications where consistent, automated layout is important.
One of the early and comprehensive reference books on the art of Desktop Publishing is Desktop Publishing For Everyone by K.S.V. Menon. This publication deals with virtually every facet of publishing and nearly all tools available as at the time of the publishing of this book in the year 2000. It is currently out of print.
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There is some overlap between desktop publishing and what is known as Hypermedia publishing (i.e. Web design, Kiosk, CD-ROM). Many graphical HTML editors such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver use a layout engine similar to a DTP program. However, some Web designers still prefer to write HTML without the assistance of a WYSIWYG editor, for greater control and because these editors often result in code bloat.[3]
DTP applications[change | change source]
Related pages[change | change source]
References[change | change source]
- ↑Robin Williams, The Mac is not a typewriter: A style manual for creating professional-level type on your Macintosh (Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 1990), 11.
- ↑Stiff, Paul (13 September 2006). 'The Stafford papers'. The optimism of modernity: recovering modern reasoning in typography. Retrieved 27 December 2009.
- ↑Roughly, a heavy load of code often makes computers slower to react in real time, and printing systems slower to print drafts. 'Higher level' software is easier to learn and use, but usually results in less efficient coding.
Further reading[change | change source]
Many books specialise in the details of particular software. These three teach the basics of page layout design on desktop systems.
- Miles, John 1987. Design for desktop publishing. Fraser, London. The first, and still one of the best. ISBN0-86092-096-8
- Aldrich-Reunzel, Nancy and Fennell, John 1991. The designer's guide to typography. Phaidon, Oxford. ISBN0-7148-2706-1
- Parker, Roger C. 1995. Desktop publishing & design for dummies. Wiley. ISBN978-1568842349
- Dabner, David 2004. Graphic Design School: the principles and practices of graphic design. ISBN978-0500285268 Broader than just desktop publishing.