The Print Shop Pro Publisher Deluxe 15 Review Click and Double-Click Eric Grevstad
The Print Shop Pro Publisher Deluxe main editing screen is a view of each page of your project -- you can zoom in for closeups or out for the full-page view, but can't see two pages at once (e.g., both the inside and outside of a newsletter) -- with a conventional pull-down menu and toolbar at the top of the screen and mini-menus for common functions along the left.
The toolbar offers file-saving, cut/copy/paste editing, undo, redo, and color and tint (transparency) icons, while the left-hand menu makes it easy to insert The Print Shop's special categories of text frames and graphic objects -- not just "Insert Text Box" and "Insert Headline," for instance, but also "Insert Sentiment," which pops up a list of two-piece text boxes intended for the front and inside of a greeting card, categorized for Birthday, Congratulations, New Baby, Kwanzaa, and so on.
Similarly, you can insert images from the program's "art gallery" -- an extensive set of categorized clip art -- or image- and audio-previewing Media Manager file organizer, or insert "custom graphics" ranging from drop caps and plain or fancily framed numbers (in your choice of fonts, colors, or gradients) to famous folks' signatures or a variety of clock faces (you set the time).
As you click on text boxes (such as frames for headlines and body text) or images, they're highlighted with handles that let you resize the selected object and a arrow that lets you rotate it to any angle; pull-down or right-click menus let you specify the object's position, move it forward or back among layered objects, or apply frames ranging from plain lines to drop shadows or radioactive glows.
The color and tint boxes let you apply solid or gradient backgrounds or transparency effects. You can make text frames as square, warped, or cartoon-talk-balloon-shaped as you want, or click a reasonably intuitive anchor tool to link frames for text flow from one to the next.
The Print Shop's image-editing dialog box is almost a match for some paint programs, with tabs for everything from routine cutting, cropping, and color/brightness adjusting; to quick fixes for red-eye flash or dust and scratches; to applying quite impressive artistic effects (watercolor, oil painting, and other filters) or quite silly stamps (superimposed clip-art signs or toys, intended for the program's goofy photo greeting cards).
When you're done, there are various output options ranging from your own printer to a PDF file for a local print shop (though not the four-color separations of Microsoft Publisher and higher-end desktop publishing packages) or publication to a Web site or executable file (like a slide show or photo album, with "forward" and "back" buttons so recipients don't need to have The Print Shop themselves).
PowerPoint It Ain't
All of the above is pretty nice (and, with fewer templates and images, applicable to the $50 Deluxe and $70 Pro Publisher as well as our $100 Pro Publisher Deluxe edition). And we came away fairly impressed with the program as a tool for selecting, slightly tweaking, and pouring your own content into various newsletter, brochure, or other templates.
Beyond that, however, The Print Shop and "power user" are still phrases that don't mesh, even if you don't mind having to flip through reams of kiddie certificates and Secretary's Day cards to get to the more businesslike templates and functions. Once you get more than a few objects or couple of overlapping layers on a page, it can be easy to miss or bury an item (we frequently had to "back out" or click in the margin to unselect whatever The Print Shop thought we wanted to click on), and if you're used to right-clicking various objects in another paint or page-layout program it'll take a while to learn which functions are on the right-click menu and which aren't.
Similarly, some of Pro Publisher Deluxe's more sophisticated abilities prove somewhat shallow -- a presentation template, for example, usually gives you just a couple of prefab pages (for a title slide and bullet points), and the program lets you type bulleted or indented lines but can't outdent or rearrange items anywhere near as easily as something like PowerPoint can. You can add video clips to projects, but they're viewable only when the project is saved as a Web page or sent to Broderbund.com for hosting in your family-album area.
In short, The Print Shop Pro Publisher Deluxe 15 isn't just kid stuff, but it's not the pinstriped business tool that Broderbund suggests -- it's a fine family or school print-project package that can step up to occasional home-office work.
