11554 Swift Publisher is another member of Belight Software's family of graphic arts applications, which include Live Interior 3D and Art Text, both reviewed here recently, as well as the Printfolio suite, Disc Cover, Business Card Composer, Mail Factory, and Image Tricks. Swift Publisher is a page layout application for the Mac designed to allow users to create attractive and professional-looking short documents for business, social and home activities even if they don't have training or experience in graphic arts.

Swift Publisher provides you with the tools to create documents from scratch, as well as libraries of templates for flyers, newsletters, brochures, letterheads, certificates, fax cover pages, booklets, business cards, CD/DVD art, address or shipping labels, and virtually any type of document combining text and graphics - even greeting cards that you can use for guidelines or adapt to your needs using the program's extensive selection of editing and formatting tools.

Swift Publisher is in many respects, while not a direct competitor, an alternative to both high-end page layout programs like Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign on the one hand and Apple's own Pages on the other. It's vastly less expensive than the former two, certainly more nimble and user-friendly, less ponderous and quicker than Pages as well (at least on my PowerPC hardware), although there are of course many things those programs can do that Swift Publisher isn't well suited to. But there are things Swift Publisher has that the big guns and Pages don't as well, a particularly notable example being its awesome library of 23,000 high-quality clipart that comes with the boxed version (the download edition has a much more modest 1,100 clipart images and fewer templates - 90 instead of 130). It really depends on your needs and the job at hand, and even price-independent, Swift Publisher might be your tool of choice, especially for shorter documents. For longer documents or books totaling more than, say, 5-10 pages, you'll probably find an advanced word processor such as MS Word or Apple Pages or even a full-features professional page layout application such as InDesign or Quark more appropriate to the task.

Swift Publisher is integrated with ArtText, Belight's text stylization program that allows you to do many amazing things with text, allowing you to transform any piece of computer text into styled and textured, highly artistic titles, headings, logos, icons, banners and more. After creating the text effect you want in Art Text you can just transfer it to Swift Publisher rather than exporting it to a graphics file first. For more on Art Text, see my full review by clicking here. Swift Publisher also features integration with iPhoto (see Appendix at the end of this article for details)

Swift Publisher can apply various effects or mask to images, resize, crop them, etc. and also support;s OS X's Core Image filters (OS 10.4 up). However Swift Publisher doesn’t
include drawing tools, so if you want do draw something, you'll need a graphics editor program. While Swift Publisher has basic text manipulation tools and supports spell-checking, it's not a word processor or even a text editor, so while you can use it to type and format text for your documents, for anything more demanding than that you will probably want to do your word-crunching in another application and transfer it. However, everyone running OS X already has a very decent word processor/text editor in Text Edit and most will have others as well, so this point isn't a biggie.

Several dozen document templates are supplied with Swift Publisher, which can serve as creative inspiration or you can just base your document on one of the existing templates, simply replacing graphics and text with your own. Templates are grouped in several categories, such as Brochures, Letterheads & Fax, Menus, Flyers, Cards and so forth. There are also blank document templates in each of the categories in case you wish to create a document from scratch. You can also create and archive custom templates for the documents types you use frequently.

When you create a new document based on a template, the original template remains intact and you work with
the copy, which prevents unwanted changes to the original file.

Swift Publisher can export documents in 3 formats: PDF, JPEG and TIFF, and can also save them in its own native Swift Publisher format. PDF is the best choice if you want to have your document printed by a commercial printshop. Also note that you will not be able to edit objects in a document saved in PDF, TIFF or JPEG format using Swift Publisher. If you want to be able to edit your work in the future, you will need to save a copy of your document in the Swift Publisher file format

The main Swift Publisher application window is comprised of three parts - the design canvas, the Clipart panel and the
toolbar.

The design canvas is where you will design and edit pages of your documents. Each page has two layers: foreground and background. The main window can also show Rulers and Guidelines.

The Inspector window contains the main set of tools for editing objects in Swift Publisher. The tools are distributed over six tabs: Geometry, Fill & Shadow, Image, Text, Wrap and Alignment. These tools allow you to modify properties of selected objects, which can be of different types: Text, Images, Smart Shapes. In the Inspector you can also change object attributes, their position on the page, position in relation to other objects, and how they affect other objects. Some tools can be used with one kind of objects only, such as the List tool for text, and other tools for several object types.

The Clipart panel is the main source of graphic objects in the program: Images and Smart Shapes, which are grouped in four tabs: Clipart Collection, iPhoto, Shapes and Custom
Folder.

Clipart Collection holds the amazing library of 23,000 clipart pictures supplied with the program (boxed version). Smart Shapes holds a collection of vector geometrical shapes. Some of which have attributes controlled from the Geometry tab of the Inspector, while iPhoto contains pictures from your iPhoto library. Custom Folder gives you access to images from a user-defined folder.

Swift Publisher's tools let you flow text from column to column or to another page entirely. Adjustable layout guides provide precise object placement. Swift Publisher's Text Wrap feature will be helpful if you need to combine graphics and text on a page, and you can rotate each page of your multipage document on a fly. Switching between Background and Foreground layers enables you to create and edit complicated designs.

I found that Swift Publisher was a bit lazy starting up on my 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, but once running it's quite responsive, and I encountered no instability. I expect it flies on a MacIntel machine/

If you're familiar with using other page layout programs, getting the hang of Swift Publisher should be pretty intuitive, but if you get stumped or are a newbie with this type of application, a very thorough and helpful illustrated manual in PDF format is supplied.

For publishing books, newspapers or magazines or other long documents, Swift Publisher is probably not the application you need, but for virtually any type of shorter document, it definitely merits consideration, and the fact that it's much cheaper than the big page layout programs and costs substantially less than Microsoft Word or Apple's iWork suite (which you have to buy to get Pages) as well isn't hard to take.

Note that Swift Publisher is also included as part of Belight Software's Printfolio suite.

New in Swift Publisher v.2.2 since 2.1.2

Version 2.2 features the following enhancements:

General:

• Improved compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard Beta (version 10.5. beta).


• Option to set default zoom value for new documents (Preferences Dialog).


• Clear command becomes available (Context menu) for selected table cell, which deletes text and background image.

Import/Export:

• Importing pictures from iPhoto 6.0.6 and higher is fixed.


• LZW compression becomes available when exporting to TIFF.


• Option to choose Color Model (RGB/CMYK) when exporting to raster formats (TIFF and JPEG).


• Memory usage optimized during export and printing.


• Documents containing user pictures got lower size thanks to automatic compression (only for TIFF format).

Interface Improvements:

• Default settings for pasting copied text has changed. Standard shortcut (Cmd+V) will paste text maintaining the copied text format. Alternatively, you can use command to Paste and Match Style (Cmd+Opt+Shift+V).


• Cmd+Return shortcut was added to exit text editing mode.


• Option to set numeric value for the image opacity added in addition to the existing slider (Inspector, Image Tab).


• Extra Space field behavior fixed (in Inspector, Text tab).


• Angle Shadow field behavior fixed (Inspector, Fill & Shadow tab).

Bug Fixes:

• Problem with changing shape of Smart Shapes with an inserted image is solved.


• Changing text box positioning via Inspector or menu (Move to... command) while being in text edit mode fixed.


• Program stability improved.

System Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.3 or later
Leopard compatible.

System Support:
Universal Binary

Swift Publisher download edition - $44.95

Retail edition (via download - License code is e-mailed immediately - or in box - $49.95 + S&H for boxed version.

Upgrade to retail edition in box - $10 + S&H

For more information, visit:
http://www.belightsoft.com/products/swiftpublisher/overview.php

___

Appendix

Swift Publisher Features

Graphics

• About 130 professionally designed templates (about 90 — in download edition) for different types of documents (flyers, letterheads, brochures, newsletters, catalogs, etc).


• 23,000+ impressive images (about 1100 — in download edition).


• More than 100 unique masks, as well as the ability to use custom image as a mask.


• Smart shapes with controllable behavior.

iPhoto integration

• Export your work to TIFF, JPEG and PDF (shadows remain if sent to a print shop).


• Loading graphics from your computer or network.


• Adjustable export to PDF using of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) capabilities.


• Apply Mac OS X Tiger Core Image filters to your images.


• Powerful Publishing Tools


• Flow text from column to column or to another page entirely.


• Take advantage of wrapping the text around the object in real time.


• Support for multipage documents with the ability to rotate each page on a fly.


• Page thumbnails panel allows you to manage pages.


• Master pages option allows you to create common background for several pages (for page numbering, heading, background picture, etc.).


• Take control over line and character spacing and paragraph indention.


• Create a text list with a variety of bullets.


• Text to curve feature let you transform the document into vector image, this will help to avoid problems with font absence when you send a document to a printshop.


• Background and Foreground layers help to create and edit advanced designs.


• Adjustable layout guides are used for precise object placement.


• Imposition option in print dialog, to arrange brochure pages automatically.

Easy Graphics and Text Editing

• Art Text LE integration to create high quality textual graphics, headings, logos, icons, web banners and buttons.


• Control transparency, rotate and fill text blocks with colors.


• Flexible control over text block to change spacing and size.


• Apply unique styles to text and paragraphs.


• Insert images in many supported formats — TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PDF, EPS and more.


• Tint, tile, control transparency and rotate images.


• Image cropping allows you to crop images to remove the parts you don't like.


• Make use of adjustable shadows.


• Selecting objects with the opportunity to resize and rotate them as a single item.


• An option to fill Smart Shapes with pictures and make creative frames for your photos.


• Tables support (cells can contain text and graphics).


• Smart guides help to align objects in respect to each other.


• Use Pan tool to scroll document interactively.


• Use Check Spelling to avoid misprints.


• Spotlight support.

Charles W. Moore

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