FontTwister Portable

When you first look at a product, regardless of its type, the first thing that pops in sight is the visual layer, which is recommended to make a good impression. The same goes for presentations and documents and with the help of FontTwister Portable you can create stunning titles by combining different visual elements to use in your work.

As the name suggests, this edition of FontTwister requires no installation, thus can be stored on a USB Flash drive, which comes in handy for taking all project items with you to work on other computers as well. Since registries are not tampered with, you don't need to worry about the host machine's health status.

Your workspace is pretty basic, with most of the interface representing the interactive preview section, while functions and edit options cleverly organized in a tabbed panel. This simplicity quickly gets you up and running, but there's a built-in assistant for more help.

The application comes with a pretty impressive amount and diversity of styles you can use as templates, also providing a little insight as to what can be accomplished. Besides presets, various textures can be applied for both the text itself and the background.

So the process is simple, you pick one preset, write down your own text string and go through different editing options to mess around with colors and styles. We have to admit that there's a pretty ambitious set of customization options which let you deform text in almost any way desirable.

Besides moving it around the canvas and skewing, dedicated options let you pick deform styles or draw custom patterns, define the outline to make edges smooth or rough enough to be barely readable, customizable 3D bevel, shadow orientation, intensity and color, as well as the outer frame of the whole picture.

Text sits on a background which can be customized as well. Different textures are at our disposal, the classic palette of colors, but no possibility to make it transparent, which is a shame considering you can export under formats that support such settings.

Saving benefits from a decent amount of formats like BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF and WMF. You can just save deform, bevel, color, shadow and outline styles to apply to different projects later on. In terms of quality, output is generated according to the window and project actual size, so you might want to work in a bigger window for a large, high-quality pictures.

Bottom line is that FontTwister Portable is a neat way of creating simple cards or titles for different presentations, especially because of the impressive amount and depth of customization. However, it feels a little rough around the edges overall and with only images as output formats but no support for transparency, practicality is a little questionable, given that modern text editors can also manage text this way.