Hello all,
I have a business idea of sorts that I'd like to try over the next year. I'll probably pester you with a series of questions on that here, since the AppleNova crowd is smart, entrepreneurial, generous, kind to puppies, handsome, etc. For now I just need to figure out a way to produce PDF files.
I want to offer simple but stylish PDF documents of very roughly twenty pages: primarily text, but with some photos, charts, and diagrams. I will create the content myself. The substance is one thing, but the look has to say: "
This guy knows what he's talking about. He has technical chops and perfect taste." This is not true, of course. Each of my customers — there will be thousands, millions — will pay a few euros (PayPal? Another thread...) to download a PDF document from a choice of several. They'll also get hundreds or thousands of megabytes of additional data for this low fee, but that too is for another thread. Obviously my content will be so utterly compelling that I may be forced to take measures to prevent it ending up as a .torrent file.
Currently I have no page layout tools of any kind on my Mac so I'm going to have to buy something. What should I look for? Keep in mind I'm no graphic designer and haven't done page layout in earnest since my high-school geography report.
I've found:
- Apple Pages: 79 euros as part of iWork. Version seems to be stuck at '09. Can presumably save as PDF from the print dialogue like everything else in OS X. Would Pages be good enough for layout accuracy, ensured compatibility with everyone on every PDF-compatible platform, and high-quality PDF graphics that can be zoomed in for close-up viewing on big monitors?
- Microsoft Word: about 110 euros as part of the home version of Office. I know it's mostly a word processor, but can it also be used for basic page layout?
- Adobe InDesign: about 1000 euros (much cheaper in the US). At this price, I suppose I may as well pay a graphic designer and get the job done properly. But I'd rather you told me that, if that's what you think. My fear is that I might need to keep going back to the graphic designer for months or years if the idea worked; spending an outright fortune in the process. (If the idea worked, I would need to produce more PDF documents.) Are there any cheap (but legal) ways to get Adobe software?
- Adobe Acrobat X Pro: over 600 euros. What does this do, exactly? Is it the only way to password-protect PDFs? Not that I've decided to password-protect the files at this stage.
- Something off the wall like BeLight Swift Publisher: about 40 euros.
You might ask: why PDF? My extensive market research has an answer for that. It turns out that I should aim at older, richer, conservativer customers who like a palpable thing they can pay for once and possess, rather than airy-fairy stuff in the cloud, subscriptions, and other piffle. This suits me fine since I know nothing
at all about clouds.