Product Reviews

If you want to put together a professional-looking newsletter, or prepare documents for printing at a high street print shop, you could use a word processor. Unless you're very careful, however, you're likely to end up with results that look amateurish, or which a commercial printer won't be able to reproduce properly. That's where PagePlus 10 comes in. It's a desktop publishing program that costs just £100, and contains many of the sophisticated tools and features you'd find in professional programs like Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress.

If you want quick results without having to learn anything about design and layout, you can start out with one of PagePlus's 1,500 templates. To design anything from a business card to a party invitation, you simply replace the default text with your own information and, if you want, import your own picture or graphic into the design. It's as simple as that.

The templates are a great way of getting started if you're new to graphic design. Once you find your feet, however, you'll discover that PagePlus offers you the same level of control, and many of the sophisticated tools, that a professional package would.

When you start a page from scratch you can quickly and easily establish an underlying page grid, just as a professional designer would when laying out a publication.

One of the keys to a successful design is to make sure that all the elements on the page are aligned with each other in some way, rather than being randomly placed. Using an 'invisible' grid - you can see it as you work, but it won't show up in the printed publication

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- allows you to place and align the elements of your page with pinpoint precision.

You can also set the program up so that every element - for instance, a text box - that you place on a page automatically 'snaps' to the nearest gridline. If you're working on a publication with multiple pages, you can create a master page with a default grid and other standard elements already in place. Every page you subsequently add will have all these elements from the moment it's created.

Once you've set your grid up you can start adding your copy and images. Placing text and picture boxes on the page is easy. If you're not happy with your original layout, all you need to do is hover your cursor over the box until it becomes a crosshair. This will let you drag-and-drop the box wherever you like.

Working with text is simple most of the time. You just type, import or paste the text into your text frame. To get it to flow into the next frame you simply click the handle at the bottom of the first frame and drag it to the second. You can insert special characters, such as letters with umlauts and other accents, by holding down the Alt key and typing a relevant code on the numberpad of your keyboard. Working with artistic text can be a bit more fiddly.

Along with all the free templates, you get lots of free fonts. These are TrueType fonts, which although not PostScript - the standard used by commercial printers - shouldn't cause a problem as PagePlus can create press-ready PDFs that conform to the PDF/X1a standard. This document format is designed to produce files that are small, but still contain all the information necessary to be printed exactly as the author intended. This means all your fonts are embedded within the document, so the printers don't need to have those same fonts installed on their machine to print your pages.

PagePlus also lets you create new colours for your design using either RGB or CMYK colour models, allowing you to define colours either for on-screen or print use.

Serif PagePlus 10 is an excellent desktop publishing program for both novices and experienced users who don't want to spend hundreds of pounds on a professional program.