I didnt realize publisher is going away!

That said, I ehole-heartedly endorse "Affinity" Software. Their whole suite of "Publisher, Designer, and Photo" editors are my favorite in the market. Easier to work with than Adobe, and cheaper (perpetual licensing vs. subscription).

I would suggest getting the Affinity suite, exporting all your publisher documents to PDFs, and then working in affinity from there on...

When I saw the thread's title I admit I hoped it might be referring to OCP or GIA.

Well, the Creative Suite is the best for sure, (but I can understand the downside of the licensing restrictions and cost). I have been using pro graphic arts tools since 1990 beginning with Pagemaker, and then on to Quark and then InDesign. Once you learn InDesign you will probably not want anything else.

If on a Mac, you might try using Pages, which is Mac's version of a layout app.

Pages is a word processor, not a design app, and its limitations are pretty much those of Word, so while I think that for most purposes, it's better than Word, but it's not a good design application. Swift Publisher is on version 5.0; there's very little activity on its subreddit, which is surprising (because a niche alternative for Mac that isn't open-source and which is a one-time license, not a subscription sounds like a winner) but it's so cheap that I'd check it out if for anyone reading this. Report back!

anyway, InDesign, Affinity (which I didn't like, but oh well), and Scribus have already been mentioned. QuarkExpress is still around.

Affinity Publisher for sure, assuming you don’t want to pay Adobe prices.

So, in Mac Pages, there are TWO DISTINCT PLATFORMS from which you can choose... either the

1. word processor layout

or

2. page layout.

I have an older version, but here is a very quick demo of how to get into the page layout view which then is similar in function to InDesign. You can really do a lot of what ID does in this mode.

There are templates when you open the program that are already in the Layout Mode. You can see the examples of layouts similar to ID or Affinity.

http://myopus.com/preview/PagesDemo.mp4

BTW...Pages is FREE!

interesting about the page layout mode in Pages. Never knew that.

very few people know about this... I call it the Down & Dirty InDesign Knockoff. Quite useable.

been using indesign for years since I am a mac user, it's much better

Never knew about Pages - since the office is all PC's that option isn't available. At previous jobs I used Pages and I wish I knew about the layout editor.

It looks like InDesign or Affinity. But I have to start the long process of re-making templates. Now I can usually copy/paste lots of things and I have layout "blocks" that I like to use (using Small Caps for certain things, or how I layout scripture citations and such, etc.). That's why if something could read the .pub files, I don't lose the old files (PDFs are great, but I use them more to maintain the record and for printing).

oh: and you can buy it outright for a very reasonable fee, and don't have to pay a subscription.

I mean, I like Scribus, but it's somewhat clunky and development is both slow and fraught.

I found this site that will convert Publisher files to Word .docx files for free:

https://www.freeconvert.com/docx-converter

It preserves the formatting of components, which was important to me.

I'm going to migrate my Publisher files to Word gradually.

Here are two examples of the worship aids I've assembled in Affinity Publisher:

Incredible work, Serviam, just gorgeous

LibreOffice Draw works well enough for my simple half-sheet worship aids.

Main body text is Iowan Old Style. Fancy font used for the titles is Yana (an absolute favorite of mine, and worth every penny). This includes the basic smaller drop caps for things like the Psalm verses. For the big fancy capitals used for the readings in the ordination booklet I used Floral Capitals.

In affinity publisher, there is an option to enable drop caps, and define what font is used and what scale (2 lines of text tall in the case of the psalm verses, and 4 lines tall in the case of the readings, etc.). Of course, depending on your goals, you can also add them as floating text objects and then enable text wrapping. Every once in a while this works better than using the built-in feature within the text frame itself.

I got the same e-mail about the Affinity trial (and also the 50% off sale running right now). There's a lot of frustration in the graphic-design community right now over Adobe's business practices surrounding Creative Cloud licensing; between that and the DoJ lawsuit against Adobe being all over the tech news, Serif Labs evidently sees an opportunity to challenge Adobe's monopoly.

Anyway, for most things I simply use LaTeX nowadays; where I actually want a WYSIWYG page-layout application, Apple Pages has tended to be adequate.

Yes. I think that it does Gregorian notation well, and you can modify that notation. It handles body text with as much or as little formatting as you like with ease, independently of using Gregorio, which means that you can do almost everything in LaTeX. It’s hard to break a tex file as it’s plaintext which is a plus over word processing. It won’t fool you; if a character is missing, it doesn’t print anything, unlike word processors.

It doesn’t handle music well otherwise, but you can use LilyPond to do it (similarly set up to Gregorio, built by people with our needs in mind) or use inserted graphics which look almost native anyway. And while it’s a steep learning curve, there are tons of resources, and there’s no shame in borrowing a line or more of code.

JT— the thing to know about it is that you are coding everything in, just as when you have to code in a GABC file from scratch. So you don’t just open something up and type the same way that you do in a word processor with a GUI. Changing settings means changing code.