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Need Publisher for Mac? Give Lucidpress a try

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Lucidpress gives you all the power of Publisher or InDesign.
Lucidpress gives you all the power of Publisher or InDesign.
Image: Lucidpress

This post is brought to you by Lucidpress.

Anyone involved in digital publishing is pretty much forced to work with one of two applications: Microsoft’s Publisher or Adobe’s InDesign. The pricing of the two reflects the fact that they’re the only two games in town. And since Publisher is PC-only, Mac users have only one option.

Lucidpress thinks people are hungry for a viable alternative, so it’s created a web-based publishing platform that’s as scalable and feature-rich as any of the big-name desktop software — but priced for access to anybody.

All the familiar functions are present for making posters, brochures, fliers, newsletters, the works. In fact, the functionality is even greater than what’s offered by the hard-drive hegemons listed above.

Lucidpress tools and features

Lucidpress gives you powerful tools for all your publishing jobs.
Lucidpress gives you powerful tools for all your publishing jobs.
Screenshot: Lucidpress

Lucidpress comes with an immense library of tools and templates for publishing in print or online. And since it’s web-based, assembling mixed media materials is a breeze.

Want to include a video? Just drag and drop it into your project. With an intuitive interface that’s made it popular with Mac users, it’s easy to arrange text, images, and other elements..

Lucidpress projects can be exported in all the major formats — .pdf, .png, .jpg — and the software comes out of the box (er, cloud) fully integrated with online mainstays like Dropbox, Google Drive and Facebook, making it just as fit for posting to web pages as printing to paper.

Lucidpress takes full advantage of its online nature by including intuitive collaborative tools, like built-in chat windows and group editing, that have made web-based productivity apps like Google Drive popular.

The difference is that Lucidpress also comes with the vast range of tools and features that people typically shell out big bucks to the big-name companies to get. As a browser-based platform, it also avoids the updates and version conflicts that come with hard disk-hosted applications.

Decades ago, newfangled things called desktop computers brought about the digital publishing revolution, making professional-grade publishing tools available to those without access to the mechanical methods that once dominated the industry.

Now that the gatekeepers of digital publishing have become as monolithic as their analog predecessors, access to professional-grade publishing software can be a major stumbling block for anybody launching a freelance career or starting a small business, especially as team sizes scale up and prices inflate.

Try Lucidpress for free

Luckily, the web is offering the path to the next publishing revolution. Lucidpress is powering that shift to a new paradigm, where the flexibility of the web offers the perfect publishing solution, at the perfect price, to anyone who’s got something fit to print or post.

Give Lucidpress a try for yourself today. Sign up for a free single-user account (with limited features) or start a free trial of a more full-featured account (no credit card required).

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8 responses to “Need Publisher for Mac? Give Lucidpress a try”

  1. ErickP says:

    Ummm…. QuarkXPress?

  2. Chris Hughes says:

    QuarkXPress has been around for over 25 years and just released v.11 for 2015 – probably should do some fact checking when writing an article.

    Also, how can you compare Publisher and InDesign as being anywhere close to equal.

  3. Anthony Stephens says:

    I love this. I’ve been using Lucidpress for awhile now at work, and it’s so easy to use. The fact that I can have our designers create standard templates and my team can collaborate in real time on them is absolutely fantastic. And it works great on any operating system. I highly recommend Lucidpress!

  4. Ray Bodnar says:

    Awesome! I really wanna try this. I’ve grown tired of how buggy QuarkXPress has become and lets face it, Microsoft Publisher is virtually unusable. Lucidpress sounds like a solid recommendation.

  5. Sarah Miller says:

    Man, I wish I would have known about this product while I was in school. Adobe products are hard to use without proper training. I’ll have to check this out!

  6. Jaan Hansen says:

    I have used Lucidpress for some time now and can’t understand why anyone would compare this to QuarkXPress… it isn’t 1998. If I wanted to get nostalgic, I’d pull out my big rimmed glasses, listen to some Mm’bop and drink some Crystal Pepsi as I install my QuarkXPress. I want to be able to print documents, and also send them with interactive features now, in the current time, 2015… Good job Lucidpress! Nice to see you on CoM.

  7. Jarom McDonald says:

    Lucidpress is intuitive and a lot of fun to use. I’m a big fan.

  8. Mark Southee says:

    Scribus is open source, works on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux and is way more sophisticated than Publisher.

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