BeLight Software's Art Text > More Than Just a Pretty (Type) Face

June, 2007

By: Ric Getter

Sometimes it takes something more than just a good-looking type font to get the kind of attention you want. You could drop some big money on a high-end graphics program or just fall back on Microsoft Office's Word Art (which, no matter how hard you try, always seems to look like it came from Word Art). Now, if you're looking for that really unique touch without putting a major dent in your checkbook, check out BeLight Software's new Art Text.

The idea behind Art Text is quite simple. You type in some text or choose one of the 400+ symbols in the program's library and start having fun. If you're not sure where to begin, just sift through the huge assortment of styles included in the program and customize the effects until you get just what you're looking for.

The effects fall into three basic categories: font effects, surface and lighting effects, and shape and baseline transformations. For the basic text effects, Art Text takes advantage of all the text rendering and styling features built into OS X, giving you full control over advanced elements such as kerning, ligatures and baselines. For its graphics effects, Art Text draws upon Tiger's Core Image technology. These are a set of high-end graphic manipulation capabilities embedded deep in the Mac OS and, as a result, perform with amazing speed. You can also pull in your own photos and graphics to create custom textures, surfaces and fills.

Liquid Assets

Art Text has the liquid look down pat. Using a combination of the shape library and text tools, you can create button designs that look like they will drip off the page. Art Text doesn't really do layers, but you can accomplish the same thing by exporting a shape with the effects applied and bringing it back in as a graphic background. The export options include TIFF, PNG and PDF, as well as Web-friendly GIF and JPEG formats. You can also specify the size of the export image, making the images work equally well for print or electronic reproduction. All the shapes and effects are vector-based, so they can be scaled up as high as you'd like.

Like most of BeLight's products, virtually all of the tools are available from the main window. Their development team always seems to assume that their products are usually one of several applications you have running and works hard to make the most of a minimum of screen space. In Art Text the three main panels flip to reveal alternate functions. For example, the text window changes to a shape selector, the fill and stroke controls will swap places with the 3D effects.

With all the high-powered effects that are included, we were surprised that there were a few expected features missing. There doesn't appear to be a way to easily rotate text; you need to twiddle with the Bezier transform tools to put the baseline at an angle. This is made a bit more difficult by the fact that there's no way to constrain the moves (as the Shift key normally would). Even though there isn't a way to save a work in progress as a separate file, you can preserve the image as a style within Art Text and reuse or modify it later. And one drawback with the style palette is the lack of a gallery similar to those in the other BeLight applications. You can only view a style in the main window, making the selection process a trial-and-error operation.

Even with some of its shortcoming, BeLight's Art Text is offering Mac users an inexpensive gateway to the kind of innovative text and graphic effects that were only available in high-priced applications. If you have a message that's worth an eye-catching medium, take a close look at Art Text.

Product: Art Text
Made by: BeLight Software
Price: $29.95
Pros: Great looking effects; Low cost; Compact interface
Cons: Lacks of text rotation; Can't preview styles

See other reviews