There are many options available for desktop publishing software, and many of them, though very powerful, also come with a hefty price tag. If you're looking to do some desktop publishing of your own, but you don't want to go all-in on an expensive commercial piece of software, there are great options available on the Mac for free.
Pages on the Mac
Mac computers ship with the word processing application Pages installed, which is part of a suite of desktop publishing and office productivity software from Apple (Numbers and Keynote are Apple's spreadsheet and presentation applications, respectively).
Many other free desktop publishing software programs available for the Mac are specialty utilities. They are fine for a specific job—such as for labels or business cards—but they may not be page design tools that cover all aspects of a publishing project.
Origami — A free tool for designing modern user interfaces (Mac)| Adobe Experience Design — The first all-in-one tool for UX designers (Mac) Prott — A new mobile app prototyping tool built for design teams (Mac)| ($421/year). When people build their own homes, they usually hire professionals to design it, build it, decorate it and such, which makes a lot of sense considering the investment that must be made. The number of quality web design apps on the Mac has grown along with the surge in popularity the platform has enjoyed in recent years. Finding decent free apps can still be a challenge, however, especially for graphic designers.
There are, however, a few free programs with full desktop publishing capabilities. Here are some of the best choices.
Pages
Apple's Pages, which ships on all Macs, is a powerful word processor that can be used as document publishing program. If you need basic business documents, envelopes and business cards, this program can handle them easily.
Free Web Design App For Mac
Pages comes with a selection of templates that help you create professional looking documents easy and in a short period of time. You can also work from a blank page, add fonts, personalize text styles, and add graphics and photos to design your document.
Pages exports to PDF and Microsoft Word formats, and imports Word documents. Mcafee consumer product removal tool.
Scribus
Scribus is open source desktop publishing software that is available for several platforms, including Mac. Scribus offers CMYK color model support, font embedding and sub-setting, PDF creation, EPS import/export, basic drawing tools, and other professional level features.
Scribus works in a fashion similar to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress with text frames, floating palettes, pull-down menus and has the features of the pro packages—but without the hefty price tag.
However, Scribus may not be the best choice if you don't have the time or interest to devote to overcoming the learning curve associated with high-end professional level software.
Apache OpenOffice Productivity Suite
OpenOffice offers fully-integrated word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database tools in an open source software suite. Among the many features, you'll find PDF and SWF (Flash) export, increased Microsoft Office format support and multiple languages.
If your desktop publishing needs are basic but you also want a full suite of office tools, try Apache OpenOffice Productivity Suite. However, for more complex desktop publishing tasks you might be better off with Scribus or one of the print creativity titles for the Mac.
Free Web Design Tool For Mac
Publisher Lite
Publisher Lite from PearlMountain Technology is a free desktop publishing and page layout application for business and home use. Available on the Mac App Store, this free software comes with more than 45 professional templates and hundreds of clipart images and backgrounds. Additional templates for brochures, flyers, newsletters, posters, business cards, invitations, and menus are offered as in-app purchases at an affordable $0.99 each.
Inkscape
A popular free, open source vector drawing program, Inkscape uses the scalable vector graphics (SVG) file format. Use Inkscape for creating text and graphics compositions including business cards, book covers, flyers and ads. Inkscape is similar in capabilities to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. Although it is a graphic software program, it's quite capable of handling some page layout tasks.