Product Reviews

If you regularly produce brochures and forms for your company, you could just use a word processor. If you do though, the results will always look basic. If you want your publications to look polished and well-designed, you'll need a desktop publishing (DTP) program. The problem is that most cost around £500. Serif's PagePlus only costs £100 and is crammed with useful features.

Like its predecessors, version 11 comes with lots of templates. These are great if you just want to produce quick, reasonably polished looking publications, but aren't really interested in learning design or getting into the nitty-gritty of DTP. There are templates for everything from valentine's cards to business stationary. New to this edition are templates for PDF forms which contain data boxes that can be filled in on user's PC. These worked well and produced good-looking, usable, forms. You also get a good selection of free fonts. These are Truetype not PostScript, the standard used by commercial printers. This shouldn't matter, however, as your fonts can be embedded in the PDF document you produce with PagePlus and sent to the printer that way.

If you already know how to layout documents in a DTP program then you'll find that PagePlus works in a similar way to industry-standard programs like Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign. When you set up a blank document, you lay out grid and column guides, which can be done easily and quickly

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from the File menu. Text, images and other elements, for instance artistic text, all fit into their own frames. Flowing text from one frame to another is quite simple, requiring just a single mouse click. As you'd expect there are also options for snapping elements in your design to your layout grid. You can also create master pages with the basic elements of your design already laid out for you - just like an expensive DTP package.

Another innovation is the ability to import Photoshop images with clipping paths. This means you can put a path around a figure or object in a photo, import the image straight into PagePlus and make the text flow around the clipping path rather than the whole photo. The results look very professional.

This latest version of PagePlus also gives you much greater control over your graphics than previous versions - allowing you to edit the gamma curve, brightness, contrast and other settings, just as you would in a proper image editor. There's even a button that automatically adds a drop shadow to the edge of a photo or more usefully, a clipping path. You can't open any image editor directly from the menu that pops up when you right-click a picture - there's only the option to open PhotoPlus. This is only a minor niggle, though.

PagePlus can create high-quality PDFs that conform to the PDF/X1a standard - accepted by professional printers. The PDF Wizard gives you precise control over levels of colour standards, image compression and other important settings. It also warns you if there are any elements in your document that may not print well. This is very useful for beginners who aren't yet familiar with the in and outs of printing and publishing.

Serif's PagePlus 11 is an excellent desktop publishing program and, at this price, an exceptionally good deal. If you're responsible for producing any kind of publication on a regular basis and you just can't afford to buy InDesign or Quark, get this instead. It's easy to use and gets the job done