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Keeping up with the growing Smithee clan isn’t easy. Brian and Meredith update their relatives with all the latest happenings in a quarterly newsletter. Deciding what’s not fit to print is more than half the battle. MacKenzie wants each issue devoted to the kitty, Digger — and cute pictures of her, of course. Jeffrey insists upon publishing fun frog facts he unearths for his science projects. Brian and Meredith can’t leave out the dogs, Sadie and Wicket, or the new baby, Tristan. 
Fortunately, the family found a winning formula: each member gets a paragraph in the printed newsletter and then publishes the extra material on the family’s Mac.com home page.
Perfect PicturesBrian helps each family member create perfect paragraphs and pictures. AppleWorks can read images and photos in any QuickTime format, including JPEG, GIF and Kodak Photo CD. MacKenzie likes to use the paint module to invert her picture, just to see what it looks like. People have to see the real her in the newsletter, though. Brian also uses the transform menu to lighten or darken pictures so they print properly.
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 Now with Mac OS X, the family saves trees by sending out a PDF version of the newsletter to their relatives with email accounts. Anyone with Adobe Acrobat reader can view the newsletter.  Simple Snail Mail The Smithees do have relatives without computers — and a few who prefer to get letters in the mail anyway. The Smithees used the Address List assistant to set up a database with all their relatives. Brian uses the mail merge function to print envelopes with everyone’s address. While Brian’s occupied with the printer, Jeffrey trains Sadie to put the envelopes in the mailbox and raise the flag. They’ll probably dry out by the time they reach their destinations. |
