A good software to design Book Pages?

For layouts you can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

If prefer something free, try Gimp.

Outside of the margins? I am not sure I understand. There are many programs out there that can be used for many different designs and creations. For graphics I have used Photoshop, for presentations that include text and pictures there's powerpoint. There are also many others, some of which are free. Yet, the free ones may not be as advanced or high tech as you are hoping for.

Try to write from right to left (Arabic or Hebrew) :rolleyes: - kidding...

Sorry to bring you the bad news: software don't do design. Any software is just a tool - it's people's brain and talent that make fascinating designs.

Yes, you are right: you don't know how to do it. Learn it. If you are using a tool (in this case Word), learn how to use it. No software will ever give you a shortcut to avoid learning.

Re: outside of margins. No matter that you create paper books or .pdf files - margins are there for a reason: both paper printers and PDF printers can NOT print anything outside of the printable area's margins.

I used to have lots of friends working in different arts (painters, sculptors etc.) and watching them I learned a very important thing: having great ideas and extraordinary visual imagination is one thing... and usually only 5% of the deal. Having craftsmanship, knowing the trade, getting dirty = 95%.

It's a good question. Word is a great tool for writing (with outlines, table of contents, etc.). But it's lousy for the kind of flexible, creative layout you want to do.

This would call for a desktop publishing (DTP) program, such as Indesign or Pagemaker. They're designed to let you put graphics and text anywhere, wrap text around any shape, and automatically carry over the text to other pages as needed. They can also match colors exactly, and generate the individual printing plates needed for a full-color press run.

Scribus is a free, open source DTP program you could try out. Installation is a bit fiddly, but it certainly gives you a lot more graphics options than Word. scribus.net | Scribus Open Source Desktop Publishing

If you want to deal with individual pages as their own mini-posters (without carrying over text from one page to another), then a vector drawing program might help - like Illustrator or, for free, Inkscape (Inkscape. Draw Freely.).

For combining photos and bitmaps, there's still nothing else quite like Photoshop. Gimp has a lot of functionality, but is years behind Adobe on usability. There are also countless Photoshop tutorials, plugins and scripts that work best with the real thing. On the free side, I like Paint.Net a lot better than Gimp because it's so much more approachable for the way I think.

I recommend you also ask in the web design subforum here. Lots of people with good visual creativity. Some of them might be familiar with publishing as well as web graphics.

Chris

This is the kind of layout I love for a book: Amazon.com: Motivating People (Essential...
What software Can I use to create a design for a book page like those?