[Quiet Man Cometh]

gah. lost my post.

Making manuals and brochures and such from existing text is exactly what I'm doing right now. The hole I need to fill right now is image manipulation, but I will also need to look in to something for layouts for things like magazine articles, etc. I have limited experience with software outside of introductory knowledge of MS Office, Photoshop, and Illustrator. I don't expect to find one program to do everything. I'm more looking for a good mix to cover the bases.

Right now I'm largely using MS Word and MS Publisher. Publisher is okay but not perfect. I basically need to be able to manage word processing, image manipulation and creation, and design and layout.

I'll probably keep MS Word and in the Future will likely be working with Adobe Acrobat (those are the two choices for advanced program courses). I know from experience that Open Office doesn't do the job well if I need to work with anything else in the process.

I'll look at Inkscape and see how that is.