Art Text 3

Paint a thousand words

$49.99 Developer BeLight, belightsoft.com/art-text

Requirements OS X 10.10 or later

This app simply applies effects to text, but the effects are something special. Dozens of presets range from 2D textures to bevelled 3D extrusions with bump maps and lighting. You can apply 3D warps on top – an excellent way to add drama or a cartoonish feel.

Once you’ve finished clicking through all the options while muttering “Wow,” you’ll start to see the limitations. The painted effects are just fills; there are no brushed strokes, and switching your text into a cursive font isn’t fooling anyone.

The 3D options are where the real action is at, even if bump maps don’t quite work as they ought to on objects’ edges. As long as one of the presets is roughly what you need, there are plenty of controls to tweak it into shape. You can also import your own artwork to create new effects, but if you have the skills to do that, this probably isn’t the app for you.

It’s a shame the shadow options aren’t properly 3D, and loosely resemble a wall shadow, when you’d more likely want a floor shadow. Although you can use any installed font, there’s little in the way of formatting. Altering kerning – the spacing between individual letters – only works across all the text at once (and thus is more properly called tracking), so we often had to split words to sort out the spacing, and then we couldn’t warp them as a group.

Finally, there’s a selection of 2D and 3D buttons and icons, but the interesting elements aren’t editable, and the editable elements aren’t interesting. The app feels a bit like it’s been padded out to justify the price.

A small bug, which BeLight told us would be fixed shortly after we reported it and certainly by the time you read this, made the initial document resolution tiny. It was easy to change this in Edit > Document Size, and the app then remembered our preference. Document Size works a bit oddly, though: if you select physical dimensions rather than number of pixels, they’re converted at 72 dots per inch (dpi), which means low-res output.

In theory you can use Document Size later to enlarge the canvas or resize your artwork, but when we did this our text usually just vanished. (Fortunately, there’s multi-step Undo.) You get a “dpi” setting when you export your finished work as a GIF, JPEG or PNG, but this only affects the file’s metadata, not how many pixels are output. Disappointingly, exporting to PDF still saves as a bitmap, not a scalable vector file.

the bottom line. Great fun and surprisingly flexible, but not robust enough for proper text design work.