Swift Publisher 1.0.3 — Desktop Publishing for the Rest of Us

October, 2005

By: Robert Pritchett

BeLight Software, Ltd.
PO Box 47
65005, Odessa
Ukraine
+380 48 738-08-49

http://www.belightsoft.com/swiftpublisher/

Requirements: 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.

Resources:
http://www.belightsoft.com/products/swiftpublisher/resources.php

Download: $35 USD;
http://www.belightsoft.com/download/download.php

CD: $40 USD plus shipping.

Strengths: Does for brochures, catalogs, flyers, printed media newsletters, etc. what Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress does for magazines.

Weaknesses: None, really. Okay, no HTML exporting yet.

Swift Publisher is a product that Apple’s Pages should have been. It does for printed media newsletters, flyers brochures and catalogs brochures, cards, catalogs, flyers, menus, printed media newsletters and posters what Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress does for magazines.

Download a copy and try it if you are tasked with providing printed content that is not page-intensive.

Swift Publisher Help is excellent and gets us up to speed quickly. And is a natural progression of earlier Apple Apps from BeLight Software.

The main window has three panels; Clipart (Collection, iPhoto, Shapes and Custom), Design Canvas and the Inspector, (which reminded me a lot of the Apple Keynote 2 Inspector showing this is a Cocoa-based application).

Swift Publisher exports to JPEG, PDF or TIFF, so the final products can be viewed on any computer platform. It also imports most graphic formats including EPS, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG and TIFF.

As a starting point there are a large number of templates to choose from. There are also graphics manipulation features such as shading, stacking and text-wrapping. While we can import and edit (crop, filter, frame, mask,) images from various sources, the preferred way to import text is by creating a text box first and importing from the Clipboard or simply by dragging and dropping. Many of the text manipulation functions are quality and rival text editors that cost much, much more in other Desktop Publishing apps for adding, deleting and modifying text (rotate, resize, align, wrap, space, lists, links, styling, spelling, finding and replacing).

Fold marks also can be added for creating tri-fold brochures.

Backgrounds are on a separate layer, so so-called “skins” can be edited separately from text and images.

For the price, getting the CD version is worth the cost of the additional Clipart (nearly 2 GB of hard drive space required, assuming you don’t have other Clipart resources for doing Desktop Publishing). There are 23K images, 100 or so masks and 100 or so templates that are also customizable.

Downsides? Following traditional Desktop Publishing-think, HTML exporting is not available yet. After all, it is designed for doing printed material. And that is its strength.

If you do small-run publication for handouts or newsletters, this app is a great way to get the job done quickly without having to have a degree in publishing and without taking up a lot of valuable time. The culture of well-designed Mac apps requires intuitiveness. Swift Publisher excels at this. Apple would be hard-pressed to do better.

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