Swift Publisher > Flying Through Basic Page Layout

March, 2006

By: Ric Getter

Page layout is never as easy as it looks. Even though this is a task where the Mac has always excelled, it can be incredibly hard to find a software tool that has the right fit between your learning curve and the kind of layout you need to produce. Even if you have access to a "real" page layout program like Quark xPress or InDesign, there's still a pretty sleep slope to climb before you can learn enough basic to get the result you're looking for. Even Apple's entry-level Pages can be fairly quirky until you get to know it and even then has some frustrating limitations.

BeLight Software, creators of Mail Factory and Business Card Composer has launched a new application that may actually eliminate all your regrets about taking on those desktop publishing duties. BeLight's Swift Publisher (currently at version 1.0.3) forgoes some of the features that may be confusing to a non-professional but adds several that will make your work life easier and simpler. About the only new concepts you'll have to learn is the idea of flowing text onto a page.

When you open the program you're presented with a selection of over 100 templates organized into nine logical categories. More than templates, they are beautifully designed and composed complete documents. You can simply add your own text or let them serve as an inspiration for your own design. By picking them apart you can get a great idea of how the program works and how easy it is to create your own publications.

One of the secrets of many of the designs' beauty (not to mention Swift's simplicity) can be found in two tabs at the bottom of the layout window. Each page is composed of two layers, foreground and background. The background holds large graphics, textures shapes, and colors that don't have to interact with text elements. They stay put when you work on your foreground elements — usually the text and text specific graphics. This feature has the potential for offering more artistic polish to the final product than any other.

With the Flow

One feature that distinguishes page layout programs from word processors is the ability "flow" text into columns and around objects. Swift Publisher makes this as easy as possible with a drawing tool that is automatically loaded with whatever text you have copied into your Clipboard (there are no Place or Import commands in the File menu). Simply draw the box with the text box tool and your words flow into the space. You can also drag a graphic into your text box and select from three options to tell Swift how you want the text to flow around the object (or not). The program has a nice set of tools for styling your text including OS X's native font panel as well as controls for line and character spacing. Swift also makes it very easy to save and reuse text styles.

Alignment tools, for text, graphics and other elements are always at hand in the Inspector panel, a floating palette that will be quite familiar to users of other BeLight products. You can add non-printing horizontal and vertical guides to each page to help with the overall layout. Unfortunately there's no way to copy these guides from page to page, a feature we would love to see on the next version.

A Matter of Image

In on respect it may be easier to evaluate Swift Publisher as a huge, easily managed clip art library with a nice little page layout program attached. The CD-based version of the program (spanning two CDs) is remarkably generous with a huge selection of high-quality clip art accessed through Swift Publisher's integrated browser. Even the photo-quality images are matted to an alpha-channel, meaning that what's behind them will show through in all the right places and drop shadows (which can be applied to any object in the program) will look like real shadows. If you can't find exactly what you want in the program's gallery of 23,000 images, a mouse-click will take you to your own iPhoto library or let you browse you hard drive. As you drag an image around your page. a blue dashed line will appear when the edges of the object align with an adjacent page element. This is a remarkably nifty feature and, to the best of our knowledge, an incredibly original idea.

Swift Publisher is one of the simplest and smartest approaches to desktop publishing we've seen in years. The program proves that if you can design features that are intelligent and intuitive, you don't need hundreds of extra ones to make a good piece of software.

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