Swift Publisher 2

April, 2007

By: Tom Gorham

COMPANY: Belight Software
RATING:
PRICE: $44.95 (download version) + $58.95 (boxed version, inc shipping)
ISSUE: 23 8 DATE: Apr 07

Verdict: Needs Mac OS X 10.3 or later + 50MB disk space (1.8GB needed for full clipart installation)

Going head-to-head against one of Apple's own applications is rarely good for a rival's long-term health. But BeLight Software's budget page-layout program, Swift Publisher, defies convention. It appears to be thriving in direct competition with Apple's near-ubiquitous Pages.

At first glance, there are strong similarities between the two programs. Like Pages, Publisher 2 opens with an assistant that offers a selection of document templates. In Publisher's case, this includes more than 100 well-designed offerings, divided into categories such as newsletters, flyers and cards.

The program's main canvas is flanked on one side by a panel that links to your iPhoto library or Publisher's own huge clipart collection - the boxed version comes with 23,000 images, the download version with 1,000. On the other side, a pages preview panel - new in this version - shows thumbnails of document pages and allows you to re-order and even rotate them.

This panel also hosts Publisher's biggest functional improvement: master pages. Master pages let you add repetitive elements, such as page numbers and headers, to documents, and Publisher 2 even lets you add placeholders to masters for automatic page numbers and document titles. You can edit master pages or assign them to the current page through the same drop-down menu at the bottom of the panel. The only improvement we could think of would be to add the ability to create two-page spread masters for newsletters.

Publisher is intuitive when it comes to text boxes. Like InDesign, a small red icon indicates those boxes with overflow text, and you can now link boxes over multiple pages quickly through a keyboard shortcut.

Publisher also offers several powerful ways to work with images. Images are added to a page by double-clicking their preview in the clipart panel or dragging them directly over the canvas. You can also drag images from the Finder or even Safari in the same way, although we couldn't perform the same trick with text documents. Resized on page by dragging their constraining handles, you can crop images directly through a contextual menu, an easier way of adjusting pictures than Pages' use of masks. But Publisher does have masks of its own applied directly to an image through an Inspector palette.

Double-clicking an image on the page opens a powerful editing window where you can apply image adjustments and, if you're using Mac OS X 10.4, apply Core Image effects, filters and transitions directly on an image. We don't know of another page-layout program at any price with this level of built-in  image-editing power, although a drawback of this rich graphical power is that typing in text boxes is sluggish in graphics-rich documents.

Publisher 2 also marks the welcome introduction of tables. The implementation isn't perfect - tables support both text and images, but you can't drag images directly to a cell, and applying a colour fill to the whole table hides images already placed - but it's certainly powerful enough for most users.

Publisher 2 is now more suitable than Pages for semi-professional printed output. Its export options may not be as varied, but they are more useful for designers, with the ability to directly export to both EPS and PDF-X. In both its PDF export options and Print dialog boxes, it now boasts a Text to Curve option to turn a document into a vector image, alleviating font translation problems on other machines, and offers the ability to add bleed and cut marks to a printout. Even better, it can impose pages to create booklets direct from the Print dialog box.

Such huge improvements would certainly justify an upgrade fee, but surprisingly, Publisher 2 is free to existing users. Even if you don't benefit from such generosity, Publisher 2 is more than worth its price.

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