Good software for presenation package? (Paper)

[Hack&Lube]

What's a good software for making a presentation package, ie: annual report, marketing brochure, etc. ?

I need to whip something up quickly for a prospective client and it has to look professional with decent graphics.

[Rathji]

Adobe InDesign is what our communication person uses to make our stuff like that. Obviously not the easiest thing in the world to use if you dont have experience with it. Also, there is an obvious cost concern unless you have access to it already.

MS Publisher is the easiest probably and has tons of templates. Open Office has a comparable version.

I also wonder if LaTeX would do what you want, I only ever really used it to do up reports in school. It is pretty powerful and does handle graphics as well.

[Hack&Lube]

I have Libre Office but also Adobe InDesign. I wanted to teach myself the entire Adobe CS package at one point but found that a little over-optimistic. I'll boot up InDesign again and give it a look around.

[sclitheroe]

Don't underestimate the power of Visio in some cases - for free-form layout of text and graphics, you can get an awful lot done in Visio, and if you're already familiar with the tool, the results will probably be better than futzing around in InDesign.

Also, keep in mind that if this material is actually going to be professionally printed at some point, your graphics need to be really, really high res. Spare no pixels, even though you're scaling them down to fit the page. Professional printing will occur at much high DPI than your screen.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Don't underestimate the power of Visio in some cases - for free-form layout of text and graphics, you can get an awful lot done in Visio, and if you're already familiar with the tool, the results will probably be better than futzing around in InDesign.

Also, keep in mind that if this material is actually going to be professionally printed at some point, your graphics need to be really, really high res. Spare no pixels, even though you're scaling them down to fit the page. Professional printing will occur at much high DPI than your screen.

Yeah, I'm going to have to learn Illustrator again and make a lot of the graphics and logos in vectors probably. Can't depend on rasterized pixels for that sort of thing.