October, 2005

By: Robert Zusman

BeLight is a Ukranian company with a number of inexpensive Macintosh products. Swift Publisher is their latest product, and it is a simple and reasonably capable desktop publishing package, which retails for $39.95+S&H or a download only purchase is available for $34.95.

At this stage of the Macintosh's life, the desktop publishing market has diverged into two very different segments — the High End, dominated by Quark and InDesign, and the Low End, where people use Word or AppleWorks (or now, Apple's Pages). Swift Publisher is clearly targeting the Low End. It doesn't pretend to be an InDesign or Quark, but if you don't need the capabilities of those programs, it might just be the layout package for you.

The first feature that sets Swift Publisher apart from it's competition is the very nice selection of clipart that comes with the CD version (the downloadable version comes with much less clipart). Swift Publisher comes with around 23,000 images, nicely categorized and keyword searchable. The clipart comes in four flavors.

The vector art and photographs are resizable and can be cropped and rotated using the basic editing tools. If you go to BeLight's website, there is a free download that adds additional editing features which use Tiger's CoreImage routines to allow a variety of very cool effects (of course, this only works in 10.4).

he bitmap shapes are resizable and rotatable and can have their fill color and opacity changed (although it is a bit cumbersome to get rid of the default blue color). The "Smartshapes" are vector-based and can have a few limited parameters changed — like the number of sides on a polygon, or the curvature of a starburst. All these objects can be set to cause text-wrap, but in the first major blunder, the wrap can only be set to Top & Bottom, Left, or Right. There is no setting for wrapping text completely around an object, nor can text be flowed inside an object. Any of these objects can also have a Mask applied, which is a very nice feature that I haven't seen before in this type of program. A mask is a grey-scale image that defines which part of the masked image can be seen. Black means that the pixels under the mask are 100% visible, and white means that they are invisible. Values in between vary the opacity of the pixels.

BeLight provides quite a few of these masks and you can create your own, from any greyscale image. One limitation is the lack of any way to move the mask in relation to the image.

Like Pages, Swift Publisher can access your iPhoto library, for quick access to your photographs.

In addition to clipart, Swift Publisher also comes with a lot of templates. These are prefab documents that you can edit to suit your specific needs. They are very nice if you need to bang out a good-looking flyer fast. You can also see a sample of several Swift Publisher templates on the web.

Typographically, Swift Publisher is competent, if uninspired. It uses the Cocoa Font Panel to select font, size and color and also provides a couple of unique effects, including shadow. There is a font size slider in the Text pane of the Inspector, but the maximum size seems to be somewhat arbitrary — there is no practical limit to the size of a character, but the slider seems to limit it to somewhere around 26pt (you can type a numeric value in if you wish). Kerning, character, and line spacing controls are minimal. Text is always entered in a text box, and when the text exceeds the size of the box, a link button appears and allows a new text box which is linked to the first to be created. Text boxes do not cause text wrap, so to get this text to wrap around the box to the right, I had to hide a rectangle underneath the text box.

The single biggest oversight of Swift Publisher is the lack of a "group" command. Although multiple objects can be selected and moved at one time, there is no way to create groups of objects which can be moved as a unit. There is no telephone support — tech support is via email to the Ukraine, but Nikolay responded within a day, and resolved a problem I was having with the SmartShape installation.

Discussion
Swift Publisher is a fine entry-level publishing program. The inclusion of the clipart collection, image masking, and CoreImage effects set it apart from other programs. The $40 price tag make it quite a bargain.

Pros
Nice Clipart collection.
Lots of templates.
Above average image editing.
Easy to use (for the most part).
Good value.

Cons
No grouping ability.
Limited typographic control.
Some of the image editing features are not fully adjustable.
No telephone support.

System Requirements
Power PC G3 or later.
Mac OS X 10.3 or later.
50 MB hard drive space or 1.8 GB for full clipart install.
CD-ROM drive (for install from CD); Printer.
Core Imaging requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Swift Publisher gets 3.5 AMUGs out of 5!

I would recommend Swift Publisher to anyone who has average desktop publishing needs — flyers, posters, cards, resumes, etc., and who is on a budget. The clipart collection and unusual image editing capabilities make the program well worth the price. If you need the precise layout and typographic controls that InDesign or Quark provide, then you can probably afford their lofty price tag. However if, like most of us, you just need something to compose your Annual Newsletter, then maybe you should give Swift Publisher a try. You can download a demo of Swift Publisher from the company website and a Quick Start Guide if you would like to try it. If BeLight adds Grouping, Swift Publisher will get another 1/2 AMUG.

Copyright 2005
Arizona Macintosh Users Group, Inc. (AMUG)