What's Hot: The full power and ease of use of Art Explorer Publisher Pro is best exemplified by over 3,000 templates for a combination of work and fun: brochures, gift certificates, web pages, announcements, sell sheets, resumes, signs, display ads, CD labels, postcards, greeting cards, menus, calendars, business forms, posters, newsletters and much more. For the novice or non-professional publisher, these alone are worth the “price of admission.”
[INSERT TEMPLATES01.jpg]
As well, Art Explorer Publisher Pro offers an abundance of tutorials for creating a project or accessing a new tool. These are really helpful and don't get in the way. When embarking on a newsletter or business card for the first time, Art Explorer Publisher Pro offers up not only templates but a pop-up option one can click to take a related tutorial. Partly because the tutorial includes screenshots, it is very easy to follow the instructions. This is more seamless than having to load PDF tutorial files each time. In any case, a little patience in learning Art Explorer Publisher Pro, as always, pays off in the long run.
[INSERT TUTORIALS.jpg]
Basically, Art Explorer Publisher Pro teaches you the simplest way to make your publication not only presentable but positively dazzling without breaking into a sweat. Being neither a Fine Arts/Design graduate nor a techie, I loved being able to output professional-looking publications. Also, the tutorial showed me how to how to do certain effects that take a long time to do by hand in Windows Paint.
So one can breeze from these:
[INSERT TEMPLATES01.jpg, GREETING_CARD_TEMPLATE.jpg,]
To this:
[INSERT GREETINGCARD01.jpg]
And just as quickly from this:
[SCREEN2_TEMPLATE.jpg]
to this:
[SCREEN2_MY_WORK.jpg]
One pleasant discovery I made was the ability of Art Explorer Publisher Pro to output projects in slimmer PDF’s and Acrobat loaded the saved files flawlessly.
Art Explorer Publisher Pro loads quickly and grants quick access to all other functions. The user-friendly heritage of Nova Development’s Print Artist line is evident. Like another novice-oriented product, Print Shop, Art Explosion is easy and fast to use.
What's Not:
If you have ever needed to produce catalogues quickly by merging picture files from databases and price information from spreadsheets, you will not find such functionality in Art Explorer Publisher Pro. In the DTP field, that kind of functionality used to be exclusive to Adobe’s PageMaker (and lately, MS Publisher) but at a price.
In a world where Microsoft Word has become the de facto standard for word processing, MS Publisher makes transitioning to publishing software the easiest of all. The 2003 update adopts many Word conventions in menus and dialogue boxes, e.g., Format, Paragraph, Bullets and Numbering commands. At the same time, Publisher affords users more control over line and paragraph breaks, such as the crucial widow and orphan control. Publisher 2003's new task-pane based Find and Replace command has also been revamped to work across multiple stories. By setting up baseline guides, it is now possible to ensure that text aligns across columns. You can also add empty picture frames and select objects behind text boxes, two minor changes that make a big practical difference. The most welcome advances are the support for multiple master page backgrounds (a la Word) and the ability to drag and drop the page icons on the status bar to re-sequence your publication.
Publisher 2003 also moves into two entirely new areas of design that Art Explorer Publisher Pro has yet to match. The first is data-driven publications. This uses the new Catalog Merge command to combine pictures and text from a data source to produce anything from an address book and directory all the way through to a product catalogue. The second Publisher innovation is in preparing rich email publications for Internet marketing. Publisher 2003 offers six different HTML-based e-mail publication types matching each of the 45 master styles. Used sensibly and in moderation, this helps bring email to life and no doubt encourages response.
