8
Softpress Systems was founded in 1993 in Oxford,
England to address the emerging needs of professional
publishers and designers for cross-media authoring
tools.
Freeway is the result of those efforts. It is a web site
development application designed from the ground up
for people to design and assemble content for the web
without needing to learn HTML, or indeed any code, to
build sites of the highest quality.
Freeway uses the familiar approaches and tools seen
in traditional desktop publishing. Simply draw boxes
on your page, fill them with text and images, make
links between the pages, add dynamic content or
anything else you can think of, and then ask Freeway
to publish and upload your web site for you. Freeway
will write all of the code required to describe your
vision, and the code will always be clean, efficient, and
standards compliant. You never have to deal with the
code unless you want to.
With its desktop publishing origins, Freeway is
a favorite of traditional print designers looking to
transfer their skills to the web. However, this is just one
group within the Freeway community.
Photographers publish their portfolios online,
businesses establish an online presence to sell their
products, home users build web sites for their local
clubs or organizations, or create personal web sites to
share their thoughts and photos.
Freeway empowers everyone—design, expression,
and commerce.
Enjoy Freeway!
Freeway Pro and Freeway Express
Freeway comes in two versions, Freeway Pro and
Freeway Express. Freeway Express is our entry-level
version, for people looking to create small web sites
and who don’t need the full power of Freeway Pro.
Freeway Pro provides many features for creating
modern web sites not available in Freeway Express, and
a huge number of productivity features.
Just some of the extra features in Freeway Pro at the
time of writing include:
• Full support for responsive layouts.
• Multiple output options (HTML 4.01 Transitional and
Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and Strict, HTML5
and XHTML5).
• Full choice of output encodings available.
• Complete color and text style management across
your entire document.
• Extended graphic import capabilities. Import
Illustrator, Photoshop, TIFF, SVG files and many
more.
• Accessibility reporting.
• Employ multiple style sheets for each document.
• Full CSS text styling and CSS Layout.
• Ability to specify relative and percentage positions
and dimensions for layout items.
• Specify padding, wrap, margin and border (HTML
items only) separately for each side of an item.
• Advanced visual effects on your web site using
Scriptaculous Actions.
About Softpress and Freeway
Introduction and getting started