For all these applications I go to an old friend, Corel PrintHouse, a modestly priced home publishing and photo editing program that, unfortunately, is no longer marketed by Corel. Other competitive programs such as PrintShop have similar features, so experiment with the program you have.

Banners
Creating a banner with PrintHouse was extremely easy. The program asks you how long you want the banner and what orientation, horizontal or vertical, do you want? The program prints the banner on regular 8½ X 11 bond paper, tiling the graphics on each page and leaving a small margin on each side to allow you to glue the pages together.

I created the banner below for a good friend’s 70th birthday. I had to roll the banner up and mail it to him in Albany, Georgia but you can probably imagine his surprise to receive such a “birthday card.” I added photos of a bunch of old neighbors sprinkled around the banner with funny captions. The frosting on the cake for his banner was taken from Frontiernet, where you type the month, day and year of your birth and get information pertinent to the date of your birth to use on a birthday banner. Another feature I like about PrintHouse is the ability to individually move letters in a headline to have the copy flow down and then back up to add visual interest in the overall graphic and to allow more room to place photos on the banner.

Posters
PrintHouse’s ability to tile 8½X11 pages to create larger images is very impressive, as in the banner I created for our daughter, Paige, on her 40th birthday.

Wife Marilyn found some birthday wrapping paper which I scanned to produce the background graphic. I then scanned a recent photo of Paige at fairly high resolution — because I planned to practically fill the poster with her picture.

The poster I created a year later for Paige’s 41st birthday shows a sophisticated tool I like in PrintHouse, the ability to “arrange” graphic on top of another, whereby I moved some old photos of Paige on top of some of the letters.

Placecards
Marilyn likes to entertain and recently we invited three couples who live in Kerrville to a Hawaiian theme lunch. I used Corel’s Gallery, which is a huge collection of photos, clipart, and fonts, all arranged in a database. I type in the subject word I’m looking for, specify whether it is a clipart or a photo and thumbnail images pop up on the screen. I found eight images to produce a placecard for each man and woman at the table. Marilyn then had the idea to cut out the upper part of each image so that, when folded, the upper part would stand up above the fold. Here's the finished product.

One of my latest printer output projects was sending 38 “personalized” letters to some old high school classmates for an upcoming school reunion. I say “personalized” because I merged a database of personal information on each individual to a form letter — thereby personalizing the letter to each classmate. I used the same database of information to merge addresses to envelopes to go with the letter. I use WordPerfect but the same function can easily be performed with MS Word. For detailed — and easy — instructions using Word, go to the Alamo Pc website, click on Features, click on Vade Forrester, and look for his article "Addressing Holiday Cards."

I’ve put my poor old color printer to the fire by printing so many color images but then, that’s the fun of having a computer, isn’t it?