Many, if not most businesses use newsletters to keep their customer base up to date. For small businesses, customer awareness can be vital for sustainability and growth. So if you are in the same boat, and don’t want to shell out serious money for publishing software, where do you turn?
Sribus is another open source offering which works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It boasts all of the bells and whistles that one would expect from professional publishing software and the results are pretty impressive. The interface is fairly easy to use for the novice, yet the professional user will not be left wanting either.
Our only gripe was the lack of an easy way to post a newsletter directly within an email. Sure, Scribus does have an excellent .pdf conversion tool which can be attached to an email but that is where easy email functionality seems to stop. Microsoft Publisher on the other hand does have a “send to email” option but this only works with Outlook (and the correct version of Outlook at that – e.g. Publisher 2007 will only work with Outlook 2007) For those who don’t relish the prospect of designing a newsletter, Microsoft Publisher also has a myriad of existing templates ready to go, which Scribus users may have to search for if they want anywhere near the same kind of selection. In Scribus’ defence, it is compatible with Microsoft Publisher, so existing Microsoft projects can be opened and edited in Scribus.
Over all, we think Scribus is an exceptional piece of software, but novices should be prepared to search their forums to fully understand all of its very powerful features.
[...] and you want a quick, easy and free way to send them your newsletter. We have already covered Scribus, but this time you actually want to put your content within the body of an email rather than as an [...]