Can I use a layout app offline with no account?
Yes. Layout by Zaweba is a page layout app that works fully offline with no account, no cloud and no telemetry, and it's free software for Windows.
You can. Layout by Zaweba is a professional page layout app that works entirely offline. There's no account to create, no cloud storage it depends on and no telemetry sending information about what you do. You install it on Windows, open it and work, whether or not the computer is connected to the internet. It's free software under its EULA.
That's become unusual. Many creative tools now expect you to sign in before they'll open, store files in an online space by default, or check in regularly to keep working. For plenty of people that's fine. For others, such as anyone working on confidential material, on a laptop without reliable internet, or simply wanting the program to belong to them, it gets in the way.
What offline means in practice
Your documents are files on your own drive: .zala documents, .zalt templates, books and libraries. They go where you save them. Back them up the way you back up everything else, share them by whatever route you already use, and nothing is held on someone else's server.
Recovery is local too. Layout saves auto-recovery copies every few minutes to a folder on your machine, so a crash or power cut doesn't take an afternoon's work with it. Several documents open at once in tabs, with Save all and Close all, and Revert takes a document back to its last save.
What you can do without a connection
Everything. The full layout toolset works offline: spreads and parent pages, the paragraph composer with UK English hyphenation, OpenType features, GREP styles, footnotes and cross-references, CMYK and spot colour, live preflight, and books with one contents and one index.
Export works offline as well. PDF with press, PDF/X-1a style and PDF/X-4 style presets, EPUB 3, HTML, SVG, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, RTF and text are all written on your machine. You can even run exports from the command line with no window.
Who it suits
Designers who lay out magazines, brochures and catalogues and want a dependable desktop tool. Self-publishers preparing books for print and EPUB who'd rather not upload a manuscript to a service. Clubs and societies producing journals and programmes on whatever computer a volunteer has. And anyone who has outgrown simple flyer tools but doesn't want a sign in on top.
Working on private documents, such as reports, internal newsletters or anything under embargo, is easier when the files never leave the building. With Layout they only go where you send them.
Things to know
Fonts are the ones installed on your computer, so make sure the fonts a design needs are installed before you start.
Colour management is basic. CMYK is worked out from a built-in model, and ICC profiles aren't used, which is worth knowing if a printer has strict colour requirements.
Layout opens its own documents and Publish by Zaweba publications (.ozp), and it imports text from .docx, RTF, Markdown and plain text, plus tables from .xlsx, .ods and CSV. Bringing work in from other tools usually means importing the words and pictures rather than opening the other program's files.
Is it right for you
If you want a page layout app that works on your own computer, keeps your files on your own drive and asks nothing of you before it opens, Layout by Zaweba is built that way from the start.
