What this template is

A wedding newspaper is a programme that people keep. It does the job an order of service does, and because it looks like a newspaper it gets read while everyone is waiting rather than folded into a pocket. The front page here is built for that: one photograph across the full width, one headline underneath it, and the couple's names in the folio line where a paper would normally put its town.

The inside page is the order of the day, set as a list with the time on one side and what happens on the other, next to a second photograph and a short column of text. That column is the place for the thing guests always want and rarely get: where the toilets are, when the last bus goes, and what to do if it rains.

How to fill it in

Write the headline the way the family would say it out loud. Two people get married and everyone is invited is a placeholder, but the tone is right: a wedding paper is allowed to be funny in a way an order of service is not, and the couple's own phrasing will beat anything formal.

Keep the running order honest rather than optimistic. Guests plan around printed times, so put the time you expect rather than the time you hope for, and leave the last item vague on purpose.

One photograph on the front, chosen for how it reads at arm's length rather than how it looks on a phone. Newsprint softens detail, so a picture with two faces and plenty of contrast survives the press far better than a wide shot of a landscape with two small figures in it.

What usually goes wrong

The two failures here are timing and quantity. Printers need days, not hours, and a wedding date does not move; order with at least two weeks in hand and ask for a proof. On quantity, count place settings rather than guests, add a dozen for the people who take a second copy for a relative who could not come, and stop there.

The third, less obvious, is names. A printed misspelling of a grandmother's name is the thing that gets remembered. Have somebody outside the couple read every proper noun in the file before it goes.

Opening and editing the files

The PDF holds both pages and is the one to look at first. It is drawn at the exact document size for the format you chose, so printing it at a hundred percent gives you a true proof of the layout. Use it to check the design before you commit to editing anything.

The two SVGs are the editable version. Every headline, caption and paragraph is real text rather than an outline, so you can click into it and type. They open in Inkscape, which is free, and in Illustrator, Affinity Designer and Figma. The photograph placeholders are plain rectangles; delete one and put your own picture in its place, keeping to the same box so the text around it does not have to move.

The template is set in the standard PDF serif and sans faces, which is deliberate: they are the faces that exist everywhere, so the file looks the same on your machine as it does on ours and on the printer's. If you would rather use something else, the guide to newsprint fonts covers what survives at small sizes on absorbent paper, which is a narrower field than it looks.

Before you order

Check the page count rule for the format you have chosen. Most of the printers here work in multiples of four, one works in multiples of eight, and one publishes no rule at all. The margin and safe area calculator will check a page count against a format, and the format's own specification page carries the full rules on colour, resolution and export settings.

Check your photographs at the size you are actually printing them rather than at the size they look on screen. The image DPI checker gives you the effective resolution and tells you the largest a picture can safely go. Newsprint is absorbent and loses fine detail, so a photograph that is marginal on screen will be worse on paper.

Then export a proof PDF and run it through your printer's own preflight before you pay for anything. Every figure in this template came from that printer's published guidelines on the date shown below, but presses vary and guidelines get revised.

About the photographs

The pictures in these templates are placeholders and you are meant to replace them. They are here because a template with an empty grey box does not show you what your paper will look like, and because a page with a photograph on it is laid out differently from one without.

Every one is public domain or CC0, taken from Wikimedia Commons, and the build refuses any image whose licence asks for attribution. That rule exists for your sake rather than ours: an attribution requirement cannot survive somebody opening the file, deleting a caption and sending it to a press. So if you print these pages exactly as they are, including commercially, you owe nobody anything. The sources are listed anyway, because you should be able to check rather than take our word for it.

Figures on this page come from Newspaper Club artwork guidelines, read on 2026-08-20. Presses vary and printers revise their guidelines, so run a test PDF through their own preflight before you order.