How can I create a professional page layout in a word processor?

Most modern word processors are more than mere typewriters and can also be used for basic desktop publishing. Indeed, some word-processing programs make it easy to create simple but effective page layouts, and in this article we will show you how using the free Open Office suite.

The concepts we will cover also apply just as well to Microsoft Word and other word-processing programs but the exact menus and options will obviously differ slightly.

Getting started
Open Office is free to download for Windows or Mac computers and takes up around 140MB of hard disk space.

We are only using Writer, so you can deselect the Calc (spreadsheet), Draw (drawing), Impress (presentation), Base (database) and Math (equation editor) components during installation if you prefer.

It's difficult to explain the basics of desktop publishing (or DTP for short) without something to work with, so we will import some existing text into a new Writer document.

We are using a Samsung printer review from the Computeractive website. We are going to lay out the text in a way that mimics Computeractive's magazine review, with multiple columns, a headline, standfirst and an accompanying image – all basic tasks involved in just about any kind of page design.

Start by copying the main text of the web page review to the Windows Clipboard, then open Writer and create a new Text Document. Pasting the text into the document at this point will not suffice, since this will preserve any formatting used by the original Computeractive web page and we are not interested in using this.

Instead, select Paste Special from the Edit menu, then the Unformatted Text option in the dialogue box that appears – this strips out any existing formatting and just pastes the plain text. Since we did not copy the headline (‘Samsung SCX-3205 printer scanner'), copy and paste it as the first line of the text.

Creating columns
The first layout step is to reformat the text into two or more columns. Putting text into columns not only helps make it look less imposing by inserting margins of ‘white space' down the page, but also makes it more comfortable to read.

It's easier for the eye to scan across a line of four or five words then quickly find the start of the line below than it is with a line of 18 or so words.

Two or three columns work best on an A4 page in portrait mode, so we will format our text accordingly. We do not want to include the headline in our columns (we will work on this later), so select everything else by clicking and dragging the mouse across the text from the line ‘Samsung's recent...' onwards.

Then select Columns from the Format menu in Writer and when the dialogue box opens, change the number in the Columns box to 3.

We also need to create a margin between each column, so set the value for Spacing to 0.40cm. Finally, ensure that Selection is selected in the ‘Apply to' dropdown menu at the right of the box to ensure these changes only apply to the selected text and not the whole page. Click the OK button when you are done.

The font and font size used for body text is largely a matter of personal preference, but the general rule is to always use a serif font such as Garamond or Georgia for large blocks of text. The extra strokes on the characters of a serif font help lead the eye along a line and make long columns of text easier to read.