Amergin, if you are thinking of publishing in print to wide audiences you will need to look at Pagemaker from Adobe and QuarkXpress. These two tended to leapfrog each other for several years as the industry standard, capable of handling everything from fliers and newsletters to newspapers and coffee-table books.

Pagemaker got off to the quicker start, but on the whole Quark has kept its nose in front. Pagemaker was written for both the PC and Mac platforms from early on, whereas Quark came to PCs relatively late.

Adobe, with its comprehensive suite of programs, some of them industry-standard, has deep roots in all aspects of digital printing and publishing - from fonts and font-handling (they were in at the start of postscript fonts) through graphics (Illustrator, Photoshop etc) through to data exporting (Acrobat). For some time they were deemed to be better on cross-platform issues, but Quark has been running in both environments for several years and has sorted most of the cross-platform problems.

These programs are fantastically powerful, but it is not difficult to learn your way into the relatively small areas of them that you would need to exploit. Although you would be using only a tiny part of a huge package, you would probably find it a better experience than messing around with a micky-mouse program which is likely to have been developed for utter computing illiterates.