Swift Publisher 5 4+

VERY GOOD DESKTOP PUBLISHING SOFTWARE

I am using Swift Express to self publish a book with tex, photographs, diagrams and maps. Despite the fact this project is quite involved and complex, Swift Express 5 is well up to the job and is very easy to use. I would have given this excellent product a five star rating were it not for the rather eccentric way it inserts page numbers. Try as I might, I can not get the page numbers to simply appear as “1, 2 or 3’ for example. The insertion always shows up as “1 of 100” for example. This is more of an irritant than anything but takes extra time to rectify. The other problem is the line spacing is not very user friendly but can also be worked around. But don’t let my quibbles put you off, this is an excellent piece of software at a very reasonable price.

Developer Response ,

Dear Nick,
Thank you for choosing Swift Publisher. Page Numbers can be customized - just double-click on the Page Number in the document and a window will appear where you can choose its format.

Very impressed with the functionality, good value for money

I purchased this app because I’d been having some issues with a competitive app which hadn’t been updated in a long while. Since purchasing it, it’s already had three minor point releases which is gratifying to see, as it shows the developers do care about the product and have the drive & motivation to improve it through fixing bugs and adding new features.

I’m using this app to produce a 90 booklet which at first blush, this app has dealt with smoothly and easily. The competitive app ended up being slow (lots of beach balling) and after a while frequent crashing when changing attributes of objects. I’m pleased to say that I’ve had no such issues with Swift Publisher though, it’s required some adjustments in working practices, mostly down to familiarising myself with the way that it works. It’s been a relatively painless process though and I’ve been surprised at how quickly I’ve been able to, essentially, re-create the booklet in Swift Publisher. I’m also very pleased with the responsivness of the app, it’s a delight to use by comparison and one that I’m sure I’ll appreciate more and more as I get to know it over the coming months.

I’ve been running this on MacOS High Sierra since 5.0.4 (which did exhibit a couple of application crashes) but since 5.0.5 it’s been stable for me. Overall, I’ve been very impressed with it and wouldn’t hestitate in recommending it to others.

Close to being really good

Swift Publisher has an elegant, uncluttererd interface and is mostly easy to use. It is (or should be) ideal for someone like me who produces a village magazine. It has some bad annoyances, however. The worst problem is that you can't create multi columns in a text box (unlike MS Publisher, Affinity Publisher, InDesign...). OK, you can work round this, by creating linked single column textboxes - BUT if you then decide to group these to create a near equivalent of what other programs provide in one box, you cannot edit any text within them! What's worse is that you can't lock any object in place and they tend to jump around. (Double click in a text box and it's likely to move by a few pixels.) I could go on. It's easy to learn and use, but I'm only really sticking with it because I find Affinity Publisher too complex. Please bring out version 6 with the above problems sorted out!

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your feedback and overall positive review of Swift Publisher. We will try to address mentioned inconveniences with text boxes and text editing in future.