Print Pilot

When you’re creating a document that you wish to print, you want it to look as good as possible. This is especially true for documents that contains images; even if you’re not working on a poster, postcard or something similar, you may still find that you spend a lot of time just aligning photos and paragraphs, so that the final print looks flawless.

While there are well-known applications that allow you to pretty up a project (Adobe InDesign is the first that comes to mind), there are also cheaper, lesser-known alternatives, such as Print Pilot.

According to its developers, Print Pilot is best used as a tool to organize digital photos on a single page. While I wouldn’t exactly recommend it for creating magazine or book pages, the program does have more than enough options when it comes to text editing.

Basically, you can add both text and images to single pages, and then add more pages to the document. You may resize and reposition each element any way you desire. The interface is simplistic but also intuitive, as you can easily handle most of the processes by clicking a dragging the objects.

Any element can be given a set of four coordinates (which are Top, Left, Height and Width) in order to establish its position on the page. Though you don’t have any buttons that can quickly align objects with one click, these coordinates are the closest you have to geometrically precise alignment.

You have some simple options that you can activate, such a Center Vertically, Center Horizontally, Fit To Page and Keep Aspect Ratio (useful when you’re dragging around the corner of an image to resize it). You can edit any text by modifying its size, font, color and alignment.

But probably the biggest flaw of the program is the omission of an undo option. Even though it’s cheap compared to other programs, Print Pilot has a few limitations that ruin its potential as a powerful design tool.