Last Month….

Ever fancied producing your own newsletter or wondered how our own club newsletter is put together? In the case of the club’s newsletter, Derek uses Microsoft Publisher, which is part of the overall Microsoft Office package.

However not everyone has access to Publisher, so how do you go about it for free? Steve Orrell has come to the rescue and topic of the evening was all around Desktop Publishing for free. Steve is a great fan of open source software and spends a lot of time checking out the best around and how easy it is to implement.

Steve explained that unlike commercial programmes, you very often have to implement a few different packages to achieve the overall results. All of the programmes that Steve used for his demonstration are freely available to all. To demonstrate some of the features of DTP, Steve planned to develop his own spoof newsletter during the course of the presentation.

The main element of his DPT package is an open source package called Scribus which is a very professional looking page layout and typesetting programme which is available for pretty well every operating system around including Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Its page layout features are extensive which makes it an excellent alternative to such heavyweights as Microsoft Publisher, Quark Express and Adobe PageMaker. It can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations. Printing is achieved its own internal Postscript printer driver which supports a large range of fonts which can be evaluated through its own very handy font viewer.

To help improve the operation, Steve uses another free open source package called Ghostscript because it contains the postscript fonts and is a file format converter such as Postscript to PDF and is necessary to the orderly running of Scribus.

One downside of Scribus is that it cannot handle text file formats that contain lots of embedded information, such as Word documents, very easily. He recommends using a simple text editor for creating the text files such as Notepad which comes free with Windows. There are numerous free text editors out there if you want something different. Steve uses Textpad

For that professional look to your document you might want to add pictures or artwork to enhance your work. Again, there is any number of Graphic manipulation packages about but Steve has opted to use the very powerful, but free package called Gimp. All graphics for import into a Scribus document need to be converted first to a .png format.

With all the elements in place, Steve proceeded to create his newsletter. Once the text flowed into the relevant text boxes he then showed us some of the many options and features available to the user. He also created his picture boxes and showed how to get the text to flow around the pictures and thus creating a very professional edge to the document.

Once everything was in place, Steve had produced a very presentable newsletter in a very short space of time. As we all could see, there is a myriad of free open source software out there which enables anyone to bypass the heavyweight and usually quite expensive and unavailable to mere mortals.

An excellent evening and our thanks go to Steve for showing us some of the mysteries of Desktop Publishing and how it can all be done.

Packages mentioned in this article
Scribus 1.3.5.1 (newly released)
WWW.scribus.net
Ghostscript
WWW.sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscript/
Gimp
WWW.gimp/org
Textpad
WWW.textpad.com
Other recommended packages
Open Office Draw
WWW.openoffice.org
Paint.Net
www.getpaint.net
XN View
www.xnview.com

Dave Robb

25th Anniversary Celebration
We will be celebrating our 25th Birthday on Wednesday 23rd September. The celebration takes the form of a meal at the Bowls Club, if you would like to attend it is not to late. You need to contact Ben Barretto as soon as possible.

Microsoft Office Documents

Microsoft’s latest Office package – 2007 is still very new and I guess not many of us have had any dealings with it. However, one issue that may arise and catch any one of us out is the new file format that Microsoft has implemented into the whole Office package.

In the past all Word documents had the .doc extender and likewise Excel had the .xls extender and they became pretty universal, especially since they granted a free licence to third party developers, allowing them to use the format.

Everything was rosy in the garden until Office 2007 came along. In its long time honoured way, Microsoft felt the need to tinker with the file format and came up with a new format called Officeopen.XML which can be recognised by the addition of an x on the end of existing Microsoft file formats. So Word documents now have the extender .docx, Excel extenders now become .xlsx and PowerPoint has the extender .pptx.

Our problem is that anybody with Office 2003 or earlier will not be able to read these new formats – which could be a bind if somebody sends you an important document through the email system. Of course, the originator has the option of saving the document with the old .doc extender but probably will not even realise there is a compatibility problem.
There is a simple answer to our dilemma which comes in the guise of the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack – available from www.tinyurl.com/3xr4tt
Just download it and install. When you open edit, and save documents and spreadsheets etc you will now find in the list of file types available, extra extender formats for Office 2007.

Dave Robb

Security Risk

It is estimated that more than 1.7 million people are at risk of falling victim to internet fraud because they use exactly the same password every time they go online.

The latest research indicates that many people admit to using use easy-to-guess passwords, such as memorable dates, the names of their children or pets and share them with partners, friends and colleagues.

The research reveals that nearly half of people in the UK use the same password to login to their banking, shopping and other sites with more than 50 per cent confessing to using variations of the same password. And with the average person visiting more than 20 different sites each month that require a login they are an easy target for fraudsters.

If you are one of the 1.7 million people who are at risk now might be a good time to put things in order and change your passwords.

This Month….

Alan will be taking a look at how you can access your computer remotely.
 

Windows 7

With the immanent arrival of Windows 7 I thought it was time to look at some of the new features that the final version has to offer.

The release date for Windows 7 is 22nd October 2009, it has been available as a release candidate download from Microsoft for some time. If you have taken the time to download it and install it on your system then you should have a good idea of how it performs and what new features are available.

If you have devices that are networked together then the HomeGroup feature may be of interest.

HomeGroup takes the complexity out of sharing files and printers on a home network. HomeGroup makes it easy to connect two or more PCs running Windows 7 and automatically share music, pictures, video, and document libraries with others. HomeGroup is also password-protected: After HomeGroup has been setup on the first computer, it generates an alphanumeric password that other computers will use to connect – if the password is not right, there will be no connection.

Users can join a HomeGroup with any edition of Windows 7, but only users with Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate can create a HomeGroup.

Action Centre consolidates and gives you control of all Windows 7 message alerts. It allows you to configure what messages you do and do not see from Windows maintenance and security, including Windows Defender and User Account Control.

When Windows 7 requires your attention, the Action Centre icon appears on the taskbar. If you click the icon, you will see the alerts and suggested actions for any issues listed.

Windows Taskbar has been redesigned and now behaves more like that of the Mac OS X. You can now reorder applications by dragging them to the new position. You can also drag and drop Icons that launch your most used applications.

A live thumbnail of what is inside each open application is also available. If you have a Web browser open with multiple tabs you get a thumbnail for each tab, you can jump to any of the tabs.

If you are listening to music or watching video, hovering over the thumbnail will bring up the controls that allow you to pause and resume playback.