Publisher Plus
Essential DTP or Pages clone?
£13.99 Developer PearlMountain Technology Co Ltd, pearlmountainsoft.com/publisherplus OS OS X 10.6.8 or later Requires 64-bit processor, at least 320MB hard drive space
Publisher Plus is a curious app. It’s seemingly labouring under the misapprehension that Apple’s Pages does not exist. It’s like someone’s grabbed Pages, pulled off some of the complicated bits, and glued some clip art and templates on to the remains.
Oddly, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Pages has a lot going on, and a more focused product that provides a wider variety of starting points could have added value. As it is, we were certainly impressed by the range of templates on offer – everything from menus to magazine covers – although the actual design was variable and broadly less stylish than the smaller selection in Pages.
In use, the app heavily resembles Apple’s, providing you with a toolbar, canvas and inspector. Even the tabs within the inspector are identical. The main differences are that Publisher Plus is a touch faster to use, because it doesn’t hide options behind menus. Yet the reason for this is there are fewer settings to choose from. For example, only a standard drop shadow, with no contact or curved shadows.
Extended use highlights further distinctions between the two products, although not always in Publisher Plus’s favour. A second sidebar provides fast access to iPhoto images and any custom folders dragged there, and it can be toggled for a selection of clip art of variable quality. But the reduced toolset is a problem. The Shape and Draw tools are both fine, but the Background button is odd, only providing settings for the canvas, while Calendar dumps a barely configurable calendar on to your document. The Text tool is perhaps the most disappointing, merely providing you with the means to drag out a box and adjust the font; there are no styles, meaning keeping text consistent across multi-page documents is tricky. Export options also differ from Pages, because Publisher Plus flattens everything into images, even when you print to
Beyond providing you with a bunch of extra templates and clip art, this is half the app Pages is, for the same price
PDF. That’s understandable for an app slightly more targeted towards layout than document creation, but in a digital age, it’s a pity to not at least have the option for outputting more accessible content.
Despite its faults, we still don’t consider Publisher Plus anything less than a quite good app. It’s usable, fun, and does the job it sets out to do reasonably well. For a lower price-tag, we’d have perhaps recommended it more strongly, as an addition to your Mac when you want to knock up a quick document with a minimum of fuss. As it stands, beyond providing you with a bunch of extra templates and clip art, this is half the app Pages is, for the same price. It never really has the ambition to go beyond Apple’s app, and as such we can’t help feeling that it seems a bit superfluous. Craig Grannell Nice enough, but bar the clip art and templates, it’s like a subset of Pages, so it’s hard to see the point.
Loads of templates to use
Simple to work with
No text styles
Tools are a bit lacking