MARTY30  I am currently using swift publisher and I think its great nd really simple. Although I am having difficulty in producing quality PDF's. When I create a pdf on my mac, I open it and the colours and gradients look fantastic like the original document but when I open it as a pdf on another PC it looks really bad. Colours dont look the same and the overall feel looks really amateur. Why is this??? Am i doing something wrong?  
(Version 2.3.2)

SJHA  I find Swift Publisher 2 to be a superb DTP programme. I have used it for various tasks including production of posters and of greetings cards and it is a joy to use. Its integration with ArtText is an excellent feature. And for me the programme has been rock solid. Highly recommended!  
(Version 2.3.2)

ALLAN GRIFFITHS  I'M JUST USING THE TRIAL VERSION, AND FIND THAT EXPORTING TO A PDF FILE CAN RESULT IN A MASSIVE INCREASE IN THE SIZE OF THE FILE. (FROM   
(Version 2.3.1)

WSERBIA  This application is super buggy. It crashes sporadically when:

-new pictures are added to a document

- fonts are changed

- saving a document

I just purchased the software today and it has already crashed twelve times within a six hour period. The last crash caused my iMac to completely freeze requiring a manual restart.

This is too bad since it has everything my wife has been looking for in an affordable application for simple booklet layouts. I'm running this app on an late 2007, 24" iMac with a 2.8Ghz CoreDuo and 4GB of RAM.  
(Version 2.3.1)

RUBAIYAT  Quite a nice simple DTP program with some surprising features (and some omissions).

I turned to Swift because of frustrations with Pages' inability to produce spot colors and bought the clipart as well.

The ClipArt is pretty cheesy and looks just like the wmf stuff you get with PCs. I don't think I would have bothered if I'd known. The templates are fairly ordinary as well, but some like that.

It is built around Cocoa so appears familiar to most modern Mac users, but it is not as refined in design and polish as iWorks.

Still the price is about right for what it does.  
(Version 2.3)

EASER  I do love this program. But I wish they would allow me to group objects. Yes, I can select multiple objects and move them as a group, but that's not the same as creating one large, grouped object which I can maneuver at will. I wrote them awhile back and asked for this feature, and they said it would be in the next release. I do not see it. Bummer.  
(Version 2.3)

HENRYAZ  This a continued review. In my previous review, I covered some quirks and how SP was too slow on my eMac when dealing with large images. I've used SP on another project on my MacBook 2.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, OS 10.5.1.

SP is much more responsive on this machine. Typing with large images is responsive, causing me to wonder if the problem with my past machine was related to the configuration of the machine or actually was a problem with SP.

SP still displays many of the same quirks mentioned in my earlier review, including the faulty text wrap which causes text to disappear out of the text box until the text box is resized overly large.

The extended clip art collection is WORTH EVERY DOLLAR. The photos included are hi-res, and quite stunning. I used many clips from the clip art collection to come up with a very nice postcard for a direct mailing. Wife said it was the best looking postcard I'd done yet -- and it is largely due to the quality of the clip art.

Alas, there are many things that are still annoying in the product. Text Styles does not behave as you would expect. I took the trouble to set up some styles for the texts I was using. When I decided to update the font within a style, two problems showed up: a) Using the font panel to edit a style did not always generate the expected results, seemingly especially when dealing with small font sizes. Multiple times, I tried to set a style to a font size of 3, and it instead changed from 4 pt (what it was set to previously) to 9 pt. (b) If that weren't annoying enough, when I did successfully update a style, none of the text on which that style had previously been applied actually updated to the new style! I had to go and manually reapply the style to the paragraphs to get them to reflect the new fonts. It seems that styles are merely a place to store font information which can be applied with a simple pull down menu, but the text remains independent of the style and does not update when the style is changed.

Generating a PDF did not behave as expected. In my postcard, the printer asked for .125" bleed. I'd set up the page to the expected postcard size (5.6x4.25). Swift Pub has the ability to generate a PDF with the bleed showing. However, if I asked SP to generate a PDF with the extra bleed, more often than not, the resulting PDF was still 5.6x4.25, instead of 5.85x4.5. Even worse, the bleed showed up in the left and top sides of the page, and the bottom and right sides were clipped by the bleed amount. Here are the PDF generating methods that failed to produce a proper bleed: Print->Preview, Print->Print Panel->Preview, Export PDF + PDFX filter. The only way I could get a PDF with the proper bleed was to export the PDF with NO filters applied.

UNDO sometimes did not immediately show up in what I was doing. When I was changing colors on some words in the text, I decided to undo the change. When nothing showed up, I instinctively did apple-Z several times. When I finally clicked outside the image area, I discovered that I'd done several undos. Undoing a font color change does not draw on the screen correctly until I clicked outside of any object.

Some other things I liked: I like the master templates, and the foreground/background tabs for each page. To insure I was following the proper margins for my postcard, I downloaded a PNG from the postcard site and pasted into the background of a page. With the PNG resized appropriately, I could then set the opacity of the PNG to very light. This gave me a nice guide when I edited the postcard in the foreground. When I was ready to print (or generate a PDF), I went into the background and changed the opacity of the PNG to zero. This effectively hid the reference image yet left it there for me to reveal again if I needed it.

SP never crashed on me - this is a GOOD sign. Frequently, shareware crashes on me while I experiment with it.

Summary: I find Pages much easier to use and more intuitive. Pages does not seem to have some of the features of SP, like editable master templates. I really like the clip art you can get with SP. One thing that makes SP really shine is the Link Back feature, which allows me to edit material in the original app that generated the material. However, the quirkiness of the UI to SP is an obstacle to me wanting to use it all the time. I imagine that I will lean towards Pages for my general use of DTP.  
(Version 2.2)

HENRYAZ  Many folks have written about the nice aspects of this program. One under-reported feature I like is the support for LinkBack, which would allow me to use programs like Intaglio to edit the graphic objects that are embedded in SP docs. But, for this mini-review, I will focus on the problems that prevent me from using SP.

VERY SLOW on an eMac G4 800MHz 512MB 10.4.11, even when all other apps have been quit. Incidentally, OS was reinstalled from scratch - erasing the whole disk - 4 days before, so the machine is fairly clean. After initially being impressed by its feature set in the trial version, decided to purchase and try to create a layout of a calendar page with 7 6MP photos on it. Images are all on a local hard disk. Loaded the 7 images onto a page. Clicking and dragging them had a very noticeable delay. If I moved the mouse immediately after clicking, the image would not be under the mouse cursor once the image started moving. Adding a text box and typing into it was painful. I counted 4 seconds between each letter rendering.

During the typing, the CPU is pegged at 100%. There is also periodic reading from the disk (presumably paging in). Clearly SP is busy doing something for every letter I type.

LAYOUT BUGGY. Telling an object to have text wrap around it would completely make the text disappear from its rectangle. I realized that if I resized the text box quite large, the text would show up at different places within the text box (say, at the bottom, or later at the top of the box), depending upon its size. I could find a sizing where the text would show up in the appropriate place, but then I was left with a text box 5 times larger than the text warranted.

SAVING SLOW. Making a minor change in layout and then resaving the file meant having to wait close to a minute for the file to finish saving. Perhaps the program is completely resaving every time I click save, instead of saving only the layout change.

QUIRKY INTERFACE. Features are nice, but I found the object rotation interface quite quirky and buggy. You can not grab a corner in any manner and rotate an object. You must use a slider, but the slider is so small that the resolution of a step is too many degrees (jumping from 0 degrees to 7 degrees). Using the up/down arrows didn't seem to update the rotation. A few times, the up/down arrow seemed to get stuck going up or down, even after I'd released the mouse button.

As an aside, it strikes me that SP is not using standard OS X controls or event management, but rather attempting to read the status of the mouse/keyboard on the fly - a risky behavior in any program, particularly in older machines which may not respond as quickly as the faster, newer machines.

A new mac is on order, so perhaps I will like SP on my new MacBook when it arrives. But for my eMac, I find SP too unusable.  
(Version 2.2)

SVOOP  Great application, both intuitive and powerful. Others (like those in Redmond) should watch and learn - also what the pricing is concerned.  
(Version 2.1.2)

NW-NUANCE  I love this program. Ever since PageMaker 5 would no longer work on the newer Macs I have been looking for an inexpensive program to do desktop publishing for my local garden club. I tried using Micro Soft Word and that was disastrous for me. Swift Publisher gives me so much more control and is a familiar format so that I can zip along with my work. Thank you...Thank you!  
(Version 2.1)

NINJABOY  Have only just discovered this and... Wow!

Kinda reminds me of MacPublisher Pro from the OS8/9 days but much, much cooler.

I travel write and publish. My search for an alternative to the usual bloatware apps that keep 'unexpectidly quiting' and losing all my hard work came to an end when I discovered this app.

It's everything I need; feature-rich, straight-forward, and fun. I'm still getting to grips with it, but even when I'm not writing, it's sometimes just fun to play around with!

Great stuff!  
(Version 1.3.1)

PHOTEK  This is an amazingly powerful and blisteringly fast application.

I have worked with Quark and Indesign for years and this application has a massive amount of the same features executed in a much more intuitive way.

Amazing product at an amazing price.... I would love to see a 'pro' version of this app going head to head with QXP and ID.  
(Version 1.3.1)

CHRIS REED  Truly wonderful

Highly intuitive use of basic imaging, graphics and DTP tools adds up to a highly imaginative but deeply practical app which repays time spent playing with the well designed templates.

Easy learning curve with the potential for high quality output soon after first try.

BEATS PAGES HANDS FEET AND HEAD DOWN.  
(Version 1.1.3)

ZIZBAN  I just tried out the demo, and I am impressed; it is fast, powerful and easy to use. A mac application created the way they should be.  
(Version 1.1.1)

XKEYS  Listen....I have been with Swift Publisher since the first day it came out and this desktop publisher is the REAL deal. Finally, we have a publishing solution for OS X that provides the ease-of-use and functionality that MS Publisher does on the Windows side of things.

And the developer is keeping on top of updates, etc. while releasing cool freebies occasionally like Christmas clipart.

Highly, highly recommended and worth it!

(And yes, a good HTML export of publications would be cool...Perhaps that will be on Version 2?)  
(Version 1.1)

ANONYMOUS  Nice program but it really needs html-export for creating newsletters readable with e-mail-clients!!  
(Version 1.0.3)

ZAC  I'm blown away. Swift Publishers is a beautifully designed app, as Macish as it gets, and it is as solid as a neutron star.

Love the image masks and clipart.

Well done!  
(Version 1.0.3)

ANONYMOUS  This program is much easier to use than Apple's Pages (which may be the most un-Macintosh-like application Apple has ever made). Everything "just works" as you expect it to. The templates are very well done and you can edit the background of any template as well as any added elements. I have yet to find a fault with the functioning of this program. One nice feature for the future would be HTML export.

I highly recommend this excellent program.  
(Version 1.0.3)

JFM  First, I thought that it was just something similar to Pages, but it is actually a welcome complement, specifically meant for producing brochures and other similar items.

I tested it yesterday and decided to buy it. Tonight, I have prepared a brochure for a seminar which I will organize in a few months. Amazing! In two hours, I could realize a professional looking brochure. Moreover, although I am not at all a technically gifted person, I did not need once to look at the documentation/help section: it is quite intuitive and easy to explore, if one takes some time to understand and use that app.

Import of images and texts is quite easy. Of course, one will need to format the imported text, but this is to be expected. It is easy to play with the different items and to move them everywhere. There are various effects available for images (frame, shadow...), as well as all possible shapes. It is easy to introduce a variety of spaces between characters, lines, paragraphs...

With a single click, one can move from background to foreground, and preferences allow to keep or not foreground apparent while working on background.

The are also guides for putting limits of elements to the right place in relation to other elements on the same page.

I am just impressed to see what I was able to do. And to think that version 1.0.1 provides such an excellent application! Moreover, no problem at all with stability: it works fine, not the slightest problem. I just don't see anything to complain about, hence my five stars for every category. I am really glad I bought Swift Publisher: not only it has saved me hours of work, but it has allowed me to produce a much better result than I could have otherwise. I felt suddenly like being equipped with the tools of a professional graphist!  
(Version 1.0.1)

STUNNING  I would like this better than Apple's Pages, if it could import and export Word documents. The GUI of all this Developer's applications is stunning--even better than if Apple had done the GUI. This is definitely a Developer to watch in the Mac scene.  
(Version 1.0.1)

ANONYMOUS  Finally! A slick OS X desktop publisher that your average joe can use.

Quark and Indesign are way too complicated for my needs. Pages can't decide if it is a word processor or a desktop publisher and ends up suceeding at neither. Print Shop has loads of great templates but isn't really set up to be a full-featured desktop pub solution. Truthfully, I need something like MS Publisher (which I know professionals detest, but which definently meets many people's needs well)...Enter Swift Publisher!

This is the most MS Publisher-like desktop solution that I have found so far for OS X (and I mean that in a good way). It has several nice-looking templates if you want to do that, or you can start from scratch. Great integration with iPhoto and comes with a small collection of clip art as well to choose from.

The interface is very intuitive and easy to learn.

Thumbs WAY up to Belight software for this. Thank you guys for seeing a real need in the Mac market and for meeting that need with style.

You will be getting my $$$ very shortly.  
(Version 1.0)