Has anyone used InDesign? Has anyone used any alternatives?

I want to make some mailers for my business, but it's just not something I'm going to be doing often. I don't want to sign up for a monthly fee for a product I'm only going to use once every 2-6 months. Are there any alternatives? I've looked at Alternativeto.net, but nothing there seemed very good...

Is InDesign even the best tool for this? Will I be able to train myself how to use it? There's a free trial, at least, so I might be able to make what I need to right now, but it'll be annoying to create accounts every once and a while to keep getting additional trials...

InDesign is remarkable. The only time I ever really used it, I was laying out some photobooks (one with photos from our wedding, one with tons of photos of our kid). InDesign has a notion of master templates into which you can just drop text and/or images. The workflow reminded me a lot of the paper-based workflow ("spreads") that we used on my high school yearbook. I imagine that those sorts of people all use InDesign now.

InDesign also has most of the functionality of Illustrator floating around, for when you want to get fancy. In my case, I was just trying to do basic image layout with a handful of captions, and for that it's notably easier than Illustrator to do things like drag and scale an image inside of it's clipping container. There are tons of YouTube videos out there that show you how to drive it and which got me up to speed in a hurry.

Depending on your needs, you may be able to get along just fine with Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or even PowerPoint / Keynote, which can be tweaked to use paper-sized aspect ratios rather than screen-sized. Those photobooks that I did with InDesign could have just as easily been done with PowerPoint, which was how I started, but PowerPoint chokes when you load in hundreds of full-resolution images, whereas InDesign is comfortable linking to images from external files. Likewise, InDesign gives you a ton of control over the PDFs it writes out (target print resolution, color profile, etc.). I'd imagine that you don't need this level of control for your mailers, but it's really up to you.

Footnote: Sadly, the "pro quality" book printing service I had found and enjoyed has gone out of business. Most of the consumer-grade services want you to upload individual JPEGs and use their templates rather than just letting you give them a giant multi-page PDF. My dearly departed service had simple InDesign templates for all their supported book sizes, marked with where the cutter would go, letting you do full-bleed printing and other goodness. I'm sure there are plenty of other firms out there who do what I want, but I haven't needed to print a photobook for a while.

I use InDesign a lot for spec sheets and catalogs. I tried migrating to Scribus, but it's not what I'm used to and it's quite slow. If you need it for simple projects and only once in a while, the price can't be beat.

Thanks to both of you for the fantastic feedback!

Dan, thanks for the detailed description of your experience with the program. It really helped me get a sense for what it might be like to use it.

Rob, thanks for the link to Scribus. I realized that I already have that installed, but I guess I never tried it I'll take a look and see if I'm able to figure it out. Do you know if it can save in a format that a professional print shop would be able to use?

Also, it's unclear to me how Adobe will eventually charge me for their software. When they say $19/month, do they mean that's the equivalent charge, and that I actually have to pay for an entire year in advance? Or is it truly month to month? If it's really month to month, and I only plan to use this thing a few times a year, $60 isn't too bad for a year of usage. Either way, it's tax deductible

Most shops and magazines accept PDF/X-1a files with no complaints. It's very rare that a shop asks for the InDesign source file. Scribus can apparently output a compliant PDF file that any shop should accept.

Thanks again, Rob. I wasn't aware that PDF was that usable

I'll try out Scribus, but it does seem a little more clunky...

If you're just doing some mailers and flyers, you merely need any old desktop publishing program. Heck, you can get most of what you need done in most word processors, and a dedicated desktop publisher isn't necessarily needed.

My go-to apps, back when I did desktop publishing professionally, were PageMaker and Corel Draw. Shows you how long ago I did it. :-)

My most recent encounter with desktop publishing was when I needed to make an album cover, and for that I just used Microsoft Publisher, because I already had access to a regular license for Microsoft Office. You might already have that license too? Though there were parts of it that made me wish for PageMaker again, I was still able to get done what I needed to get done with Publisher.

I'd second Scribus, but that's probably more than you need -- it's intended for desktop publishing. If you're doing a simple mailer, I'm assuming you're talking something more like a post-card, than a multi-page brochure. If that's true, then Tony's right -- you probably have all the functionality you need in a word-processor. If you're doing something a bit more artistic, then you could give Inkscape a try -- I've used it quite successfully for a number of brochures, postcards, and other print jobs.

The company my wife uses for all her theatre printing is Overnight Prints. They have templates for all of their products, that you can download, including ones for Adobe Illustrator, which import into Inkscape just fine. They accept PDF, as well as plain old images. I'm pretty happy with the quality from them.