July/August, 2005

By: Michael Kleper

Swift Publisher is a surprisingly capable and full-featured desktop publishing program for the money. Its sleek interface belies the sophistication of the documents and printed materials of all kinds that can be designed and output. Novices, for whom the program was created, will appreciate the 60+ professionally designed templates from which they can choose to begin their creation of newsletters, brochures, flyers. etc. Upon start-up the user is presented with the Swift Publisher Assistant, from which the can select designs from a listing of categories. The Templates can be modified easily to meet the needs of the user. Users can also create their own templates, or begin from a blank layout.

The program, provided on two CDs, includes 23,000+ pieces of clipart, categorized into classifications of general interest, such as Animals, Borders, Business & Office, Computers, People, Transportation, and 28 others. The images are very appealing, and lend a professional touch to printed output.

Despite its low cost, the package provides many advanced publishing capabilities, such as drop shadows, run-arounds, text flow, object alignment and distribution, cropping, page numbering, image masking, layers (foreground and background), spell-checking, text/paragraph styles, transparency, and more. Files can printed or output as TIFF, JPEG, or PDF. Complete product information at http://www.belightsoft.com/swiftpublisher/. $39.95