May, 2006

By: John Cruise

LIKABLE CONSUMER-LEVEL PAGE-LAYOUT APP

Even if you've spent lots of time with InDesign or QuarkXPress, you'll be impressed with Swift Publisher, a consumer-level word-processing and page-layout app.It combines an intuitive interface, a limited but versatile feature set, and gobs of templates and clip art.

Swift Publisher has much in common with Apple's Pages, which comes with the Keynote presentation app in iWork '06. pages is definitely stronger than Swift Publisher in some areas; for example, Pages includes chart-making capabilities, tables, tables of contents, footnotes, bookmarks, hyperlinks, and character styles, and it lets you export Word, HTML, RTF, and Plane Text files. Then again, iWork costs more than twice as mach as Swift Publisher, and it doesn't include any clip art or nearly as many templates.

To create a publication, you can use any of several dozen templates that are included with the app, or you can start with a blank document. There are several template categories—including Cards, Catalogs, Certificate, Flyers, Letterheads and Posters—and you can create your own custom templates. Each category includes several predesigned layouts with placeholder text, placeholder graphics, and text and paragraph styles; there are also blank layouts with standard dimensions.

Page maker. A Swift Publisher publication consist of text rectangles, graphics, and lines, so building a page is much like building a page with any page-layout app—you add objects to a page, and then you modify them. Swift Publisher includes a staggeringly large library of clip art—over 23,000 images—though the quality varies. Some graphics are quite good, but many are bitmaps that ill-suited for high-resolution output (though perfectly adequate for you inkjet or laser printer). You can also display your iPhoto library in the clip-art panel, or you can choose a folder of graphics to display. A keyword search lets you hunt through the built-in clip-art library or the Internet. You can also import graphic files, including native Photoshop (PSD) and Illustrator (AI) files.

While swift Publisher's features set isn't nearly as broad as its high-end cousins it matches up quite well in many key areas. For example, typographic features includes line spacing (leading), space before paragraphs, standard alignments (left, centered, right, and justified), hyphenation, kerning, baseline shift, drop shadows, OpenType support, and text and paragraph styles. You can also crop, scale, flip, tile, and colorize any graphic.

Before you start thinking that Swift Publisher is a high-end contender, consider a few of its limitations: It has no color separations, color trapping, or Pantone colors. While you can add, delete, and move pages, there aren't any master pages, per se (each document page has its own background). There's also no automatic page numbering, no table-of-contents generation, and no indexing feature.

The minimal documentation reads like a poor translation. A typical example: "The 'Object causes wrap' checkbox [sic] enables/disables the selected object wrapping by text. When wrap is enables [sic], you can select type of wrapping." Fortunately, the interface is quite intuitive.

The bottom line. Swift Publisher doesn't have nearly as many word-processing features as Microsoft Word (thankfully), nor does it have as many typographic, page-layout, long-document, or printing features as high-end page-layout apps. Then again, Swift Publisher isn't aimed at high-end publishers. It's more for schools, students. nonprofits, churches, and small businesses that want to produce nice-looking color publication in small quantities, but don't need an expensive, industrial-strength app.

GOOD NEWS: Versatile feature set. Easy to use. Lots of templates and clip art. Reasonably priced. BAD NEWS: Doesn't compare favorably to Pages in some areas. Few features for long documents. Documentation needs work.

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