COMPANY: Softpress Systems Limited | URL: www.softpress.com | TYPE: Standalone | PLATFORM: Mac | PRICE: Varies
Previous versions of Freeway have thrilled designers around the world with a combination of print-quality typography, precision page layout and superb image control. Freeway 5 raises the stakes even higher.

What is Freeway?

Simply the fastest and easiest way to assemble content and create stunning, standards-compliant websites. Freeway is THE total solution for professionals and home users. Powerful and intuitive, Freeway is full of features like advanced graphic handling, graphic text on-the-fly, the ability to employ dynamic content and database integration and so much more. And you never need to write code.

REAL CSS CONTROL
Freeway 5 Pro can be used to create CSS (table-less) page layouts using absolute positioning, and exposes the real power of CSS through relative positioning, percentage scaling of all elements, partial styles, and more, and all with the legendary Freeway WYSIWYG design view.

HTML Lists
Freeway 5 has improved support for HTML lists. Most importantly, it is now possible to create nested lists—lists within lists. There is also a new streamlined method for creating lists in the Inspector Palette.

HTML Box Background Effects
Freeway 5 can apply background effects to HTML items. This allows you to set graphic effects on HTML items that are similar to those that can be applied to graphic items (see Graphic Effects.) You can use this feature to create HTML boxes with translucent backgrounds, borders, glows, and shadows.

Sliced Background Images
Freeway 5 has an option for slicing background images so that they can be used to apply a border or effect to an HTML item. This allows you to create HTML boxes with decorative borders, or shadows, or translucent backgrounds etc.

To create a sliced background image, you will normally want to use an image that has a framed border and a uniform central area, which may be transparent or semi-transparent. Freeway 5 also provides customizable background effects which will automatically generate a sliced background image.

GRAPHIC BOX EFFECTS
Freeway 5 adds two new graphic effects (Inner Shadow and Inner Glow), and has an improved interface for applying effects to graphic items. This is similar to the interface for applying background effects to HTML items.

There are five effects to choose from: Outer Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, and Foreground.

EDITABLE GRAPHIC TEXT
Use any font installed on your Mac to create graphic headlines or other decorative elements. All of the effects above can be applied to the text—even on a character by character basis. Use advanced kerning, tracking, baseline shift, and more to refine your typographical message. Use any color or combination of colors you like. When you publish, a graphic will be created out of the text. The text remains editable within Freeway.

TRANSPARENCY
Freeway 5 takes the idea of a fully transparent graphic compositing engine to the next level. Any object on the page, even characters of type, can have transparency or variable opacity. When you overlap two transparent objects, Freeway will either composite them together, or maintain them as separate layered objects in the final layout. Anti-aliasing to blend overlapping colors is automatically calculated. Freeway 5 Pro supports transparent images from Photoshop, Illustrator and Freehand, Fireworks, and many other applications.

UNICODE—BECAUSE IT’S NOT SUCH A SMALL, SMALL, WORLD
Unicode text allows you to mix characters from many languages within a single line of text. Visitors to your site don’t need to have special fonts for each language, or to select the page language from a list—it just works. Each Unicode font can contain tens of thousands of characters or glyphs.

STANDARDS-COMPLIANT
Designing with standards means that you can trust that a modern browser will always render your pages consistently. It also means that you can create designs that work well for visually disabled visitors using “speaking” browsers, or cell-phone/PDA users, or new platforms yet to be invented. Even create XHTML Strict without a trip to MIT for a Master’s degree

Internet Explorer Compatibility
Microsoft Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser on Windows computers, but it has a number of limitations in its support for web standards. Freeway 5 provides three levels of Internet Explorer compatibility. Internet Explorer 7 has greatly improved support for web standards in comparison with Internet Explorer 6, which is used by a shrinking number of people.

NEW INTERFACE
Carefully designed to make it easier to focus on your design, while keeping everything you need close at hand. The redesigned Inspector dynamically resizes itself to present just the tools you need for the current selection The Site panel makes it easy to create pages or folders, and to organize your site quickly. It even supports Finder like color labelling to help you flag pages for action or to signify functionality.

The configurable toolbar allows you to personalize Freeway to your own working style. Contextual pop-up menus come to life with a Control-click (or right-click on a multi-button mouse) and present the most-used options for the current selection. Scroll wheel support allows you to blaze through large documents. Dynamic Site Panel allows site arrangement, drag & drop, object selection and more. Page Preview using the same rendering engine as Apple Safari—check a page in a genuine browser view without publishing your entire site

OTHER NOTABLE FREEWAY 5 FEATURES
Email adress obfuscation to help keep the spammers away
Link styles - change the colour of links in any CSS item
Save Archive - create an archive of your site for backup or transporation
Improved margin and grids
Built-in preview within Freeway (Safari/Webkit)
Integrated .Mac upload
Quick Look compatibility in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Spotlight compatibility in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and beyond

IMPROVED GRAPHICS HANDLING
Full EPS (Panther & later), Illustrator, Photoshop layered file import
Graphic box effects, Text effects - shadow, glow, emboss, blur, scatter
Vector effects (wobble and crack), Border types (dashing, dotted)
Improved transparency (opacity) options

Graphics and Graphics Extra FAST packs are built into Freeway 5:
—Sharpen, Blur, Watermark, ChromaKey, Duotone, Fade, FillMaster, PhotoFrame, PhotoMagic, Posterize, Scan Lines, Solarize, Sharpen, Saturate, Linear Blur, Impress, Hue Rotate, ChromaKey, Advanced Fade

CODE OUTPUT
Unicode for truly multilingual sites; mix languages on the same page, even on the same line. Unicode keyboards, Unicode filenames
Encodings/import encodings/Auto/UTF8
Generate standards-compliant XHTML (Strict and Transitional), HTML 3.2, HTML 4
Output options on “By Page” basis
CSS
CSS Layout - CSS layout items - control over CSS/table layout
Child items, relative and absolute items, percentage positions and sizes
CSS borders, padding and margins
CSS styling with partial styles and tag styles
Create and use external style sheets
Full style management
Some of Freeway’s powerful and unique features include:

MULTIPLE MASTER PAGES
Designing a Web site using master pages is one of the keys to the amazing level of productivity that can be achieved with Freeway. Master pages are used for repeating features such as layout, navigation bars, page backgrounds and graphic elements. Use as many different master pages as required.

LAYOUT TOOLS
Including transformation, zoom, guide and ruler features, all with both graphical and numeric controls for accurate positioning. Content can be placed in overlapping boxes, text on graphic, text on text, graphic on graphic, even text on animated GIFs! Drag and drop directly into Freeway from most applications (for example iPhoto, iTunes, Extensis Portfolio, iView Media Pro, and so on).

LINK MAP
Provides a complete overview of the hyperlinks that connect each page in a site. Hyperlinks made within the site are automatically tracked and are impossible to break accidentally.

Although not reflected in the Link Map, Freeway also allows you to edit the hyperlinks and change backgrounds in Flash movies directly in the layout.

Link Styles
Freeway 5 has an improved user interface for setting link styles, and Freeway 5 Pro allows you to set link styles on CSS items as well as pages.

•Select a page or CSS item
•Change to the Appearance pane of the Inspector palette.
•In the Links section, choose link colors from the color popup menus and/or select the underline state you would like.