example of newspaper article

One of the wonderful resources I had for putting together this book for my mom was bunch of newspaper articles written by one of her fellow travelers on the trip. I wanted to include them because they had good information on what the trip was like, plus another perspective on Europe in 1952. But scanning in the articles and including them that way was problematic. First they were visually messy. They were different sizes and shapes and cut out from the paper in different way. Also some of them I just had a bad copy of the article and not the original. The next problem with going the scanned route was making them big enough on the page to be readable. After some thought I decided to try to replicated the look of the newspaper but to redo them so they fit into the book in a seamless way. The drawback was getting the text from the articles into my computer. I’ve never figured out how to do OCR so I had to type them in. It took awhile but I think it was worth it.

master page for newspaper articles

After I got the articles typed the next step was to create a master page for the newspaper articles. My basic master page has a dark brown background but that doesn’t look like a newspaper. So I changed the background to a nice cream color (I used the same color as the large text titles on each page). I changed the text to black and I went from three columns of text to five so that it would have the narrow column look of a newspaper. I added a header to duplicate the look of a newspaper and a large headline style for the title of each article.

Then we I came to the spot in the book where each newspaper article belonged it was a fairly simple task to change the master page and paste into the page the title and text. Then there were just a few little tweaks for the article and it was ready to go. I was very happy with the solution and I will keep it in mind for use in future projects.