Product Reviews

Serif PagePlus has a long and distinguished history in the budget DTP market, offering professional-style publishing tools for an amateur-style price tag. Previous versions brought the ability to produce web pages and four-colour CMYK separations. Version 6 builds on this, with a whole range of additions and enhancements.

What you actually get here is a 'Publishing Studio'. At the heart of the package is PagePlus 6 itself, which includes sophisticated text editing and wrapping tools, guides, grids, multiple-page layout and many of the features of high-end programs like PageMaker. You also get LogoPlus (for creating logos and headings), CalendarPlus (for inserting calendars in your pages) and TablePlus (an external table-creation program). And then there's the nine-CD 100,000 Deluxe Graphics Pack, containing vector-based art and photos.

Earlier versions of PagePlus had Adobe's pricier PageMaker program firmly in their sights, and worked in much the same way. This time, though, there's more than an a touch of Microsoft's Publisher evident in the redesign - both in the way the Page Wizard templates are displayed, and in the new colour schemes for instantly changing the whole look of your publications.

Make no mistake; this is a pretty serious upgrade, with more changes than we've got space to mention here. They include the ability (at last!) to have more than one document open at a time, and the addition of another 1,000 Page Wizards, or customisable

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templates. Many of these are a bit cheap and tacky, though, as is much of the clip art. Kids will be happy, but if you want to use PagePlus to promote your business, you're going to have to be pretty selective.

Other new tools include a 'Professional Print Wizard' designed to output your publications as PostScript files, which you can then take to your local print bureau for professional printing. That's the theory, anyway. In practice, you'd be well advised to phone round the local bureaux first to make sure they're happy to take PostScript files - you can't preview the results easily, and it's not always a reliable printing format.

The new interface uses a 'Studio' area running vertically down the right-hand side of the screen for rapid access to common tools and objects. It works well, too, and is very similar to the system used in Serif's own DrawPlus 4 application (and by Microsoft in PhotoDraw 2000).

And it all works very well indeed. The new, flexible Page Wizards 'remember' your information, so you seldom have to type it in again; a new 'auto-imposition' option lets you print multiple pages on a single sheet, ready for folding; and the web publishing tools have been upgraded to support HTML 4 - PagePlus 6 will also warn you if you've used graphics that will take too long to download, or used design techniques (like overlapping objects) that won't translate into web pages. It's almost as impressive a web authoring application as it is a standard DTP tool.

So what's PagePlus up against? Programs like Corel Print House and Microsoft's Home Publishing Suite are even cheaper, but they don't have the flexibility or potential of this program. How about Microsoft Publisher? Here, things are very much closer, though PagePlus 6 manages to do what Publisher does at a significantly lower price. It's not a serious rival in the professional market, where QuarkXPress, PageMaker and InDesign will blow it out of the water, but as an affordable design tool for beginners, home users or small businesses, PagePlus 6 is an excellent choice.