Publisher

[kschutt]

Does OpenOffice currently have anything similar to Microsoft Publisher? I need something to create a newsletter for school patrons. I'm open to any suggestions.

Thank you!

[RGB]

That's depends on what you want. The begins magazine is completely done with Impress. You can also try with Draw, but keep in mind that neither of those two apps were designed for the job. For something more "specific", you can try Scribus.

[acknak]

Writer is quite capable of producing a typical newsletter.

There are some layout features (e.g. beginning an article on one page and continuing it on another) that are more "fiddly" in Writer, or missing some important function (e.g. Writer will not automatically provide the "Continued on p __" or "Continued from p __"), however Writer provides many important convenience features that are not found in more specialized packages like Scribus, like simple WYSIWYG text formatting.

I prefer to learn a general-purpose package like OOo, that will do what I need with some effort, rather than to invest a lot of time learning a very specialized tool like Scribus, because knowledge of OOo is useful for many other projects.

If all I did was desktop publishing, and I had some potential to do professional publication work, then learning Scribus might be a more attractive alternative.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

If it is mostly text, then Writer will do fine. If you want to get more graphically creative then try PagePlus. There is a free version you can use as long as you wish, but you may need PP9 or later. See the Comparison Chart to see which version will do what you need.