Product Reviews

Back in 1991, demos of the original PagePlus were impressive enough to give DTP giant Quark some cause for concern. But Serif has always focused on a broad rather than specialist user base, matching professional-class page-layout programs feature-for-feature but making them easier to master and cheaper to buy. Even now, version 9 still finds scope for valuable enhancements and - all too rare in today's climate of bland software upgrades - some new killer features.

First, here's a quick recap of what PagePlus already offers. It's a fully WYSIWYG page-layout program for print documents and websites, with graphics illustration tools built-in. It offers automated features, such as publication creation wizards and one-click-updatable colour schemes, making it similar to its closest competitor, Microsoft Publisher. Anyone can pick up the program, generate a smart-looking template layout and customise it with little effort. But PagePlus's big advantage over Publisher is that it's also powerful and capable enough to satisfy serious design work, not just the usual low-end DTP cliche of club newsletters and greetings cards.

The combination is quite unlike anything you'll find in any other single graphics package. On one hand you get flexible shape drawing tools, mesh fills, gradient transparency and generally the kind of features you'd normally buy an illustration program for. On the other, PagePlus provides advanced text layout and composition tools including story and table editors, automated bullets and numbering, reference indexing and hyperlinks.

Most of the new features in PagePlus 9 are centred around graphic design. One of the most powerful is Object Styles, which works much like the Styles feature in Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand. Having applied fill and stroke colours, patterns, textures, fonts and so on to an object, these attributes can be saved to the new Object Styles palette and re-applied with one click to other text and shape objects.

There was a time when any special graphic effect required you to duck out of PagePlus into a dedicated logo art OLE program called LogoPlus, but not any more. The final nail in the coffin of that old system is Instant 3D, a simple but effective vector shape extruder. Results are too low-end to be used professionally, and you can't

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apply it to text unless it's converted to outlines, but it's a fun addition to the existing bevel and shadow options for creating web page graphic elements. Also superseding LogoPlus is the new Curved Path Text tool for drawing freehand paths and running live text along them.

Drawing tools in general have been expanded and improved. People who can't get the hang of Bezier curves can now use Smart Curves, which smooth themselves automatically around the points you click. The upgrade provides more options for combining simple shapes into complex shapes, using one shape to cut away from another underneath, and converting irregular shapes to text frames. There's even an envelope-warping feature, similar to that in professional illustration packages, by which you distort an entire selected graphic by changing the shape of its outer 'envelope' frame.

The advanced PagePlus user should be pleased to find that the program now supports ICC colour management, so you can incorporate the program into a full digital colour-managed workflow using the same profiles as Adobe Photoshop. More impressive still is the new Acrobat PDF export filter. Not only can you save your page layouts as PDF documents, you can also save them with many specialist Acrobat features including embedded font subsets, custom image compression settings, password protection, and bleed and crop settings. You can export to PDF 1.3 (Acrobat 4-compatible) format right up to PDF 1.5 (Acrobat 6-compatible), and Serif has even thrown in a couple of PDF/X-1 presets for people intending to use PagePlus for mainstream prepress work.

Importantly, PDF support extends to certain on-screen functions suitable for electronic documents. You can preserve active hyperlinks from PagePlus when exporting to PDF and set bookmarks using the new Bookmarks Manager palette. Annotations can be added in the form of PageHints, and it's possible to produce island spreads (facing pages) within the PDF simply by ticking Impose Pages. Serif should be praised for its PDF implementation in PagePlus 9: it now has the most complete and up-to-date set of PDF export features included free with any page layout program other than Adobe InDesign.

It's not all perfection, of course. There remain a few user interface issues that we've felt uncomfortable with for many years. These include the way docked palettes seem to occupy an unnecessarily enormous amount of screen space, and the drag-and-drop ruler guides, that seem to work in precisely the opposite manner to those in every other program under the sun. Also irritating is the fact that the Resource Manager window automatically closes after carrying out a task instead of staying on-screen just in case you want to repeat it.

But these are minor problems in an otherwise first-rate package. PagePlus might have lost its way in the mid-1990s, but version 9 has brought it back with a vengeance.