News :: 15MR: SWF Printer Pro
Hello and welcome to another edition of 15-Minute Review! Today’s guinea pig is SWF Printer Pro—a printer driver to allow you to create Flash presentations of anything that can be printed, and also an affordable PDF maker as well.
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“SWF Printer PRO converts documents (DOC, XLS, HTML etc) into both standalone flash movie (.swf) presentation with navigation and/or PDF document format with security options support.”
Quick Pros
- Great concept
- Easy to use for both PDFs and SWFs
- Would be a very affordable alternative to Adobe’s solution
Quick Cons
- Results are less than stellar (See below)
Expansion
I was very excited to get this and use this. My main job uses PDFs extensively and SWFs would be wonderful addition to the website as well as since their adoption is as high as PDFs for the interface. The interface was surprisingly easy to use compared to Adobe Acrobat/Distiller. For newbies to PDFs, the Adobe settings can be overwhelming to say the least. At first, I was already getting gung-ho to recommend this to people. My shock came next.
I thought a great first target would be Giveaway of the Day’s page on this application—okay, so it turned out not so great. Here are the results:
Well, okay. I understand that printing pages from HTML are sometimes odd. CSS being apparently dropped randomly, and the layout majorly goofed. So I thought to try my website next. Okay. It turns out not quite as bad, but the CSS is still goofed, there’s areas shifted around and the text down the right is cut off (Understandable in the SWF, but the PDF?)
Okay, so I thought this may be isolated to printing HTML and such. So I drop out to Photoshop, where I do my design. Okay, the results are more to be expected in the PDF, but what happened to the SWF?
Now, for the sake of the 15-minute review, I stopped here as since I’m now running well over my time. I did try a few more applications (Quickly without saving the results, sorry) and ended up with similar results over and over.
Verdict
Well, this program is a great concept. I loved the idea of porting to SWF, and the idea of an affordable PDF maker (Lets face it, Adobe Acrobat is overpriced for individuals and any small businesses to manage.) I got into it, and realized that it really hasn’t undergone a lot of testing and debugging. I feel like we would be paying to beta-test if we payed for it. Unless you can force this application to work better, I would steer you clear of it, even for free purposes. If you want to make PDFs for more affordable, go with something like PDF995 or Cute PDF Writer or similar. If you want SWF producing software, I’d recommend doing it by hand still unless, again, you can force this to work decently.
One other sidenote, the author ByteScout needs to keep up on their pricing. It is stated on their website a price of $65. However, if you go to the purchase price, it takes it down to $49. I know if I went to Giveaway of the Day later, saw the price was $49, went to ByteScout and saw $65, I would probably not even click through on the ‘Buy Now’ button to see that there was indeed an error.
So, in closing, unless you’re up for a massive challenge, steer clear of this application until they clean it up. It is a GREAT concept and I would be more than willing to redo my review when it is fixed up to a professional level. For now, it’s being uninstalled.
Posted by BladedThoth on Sunday, February 11, 2007
