Product Reviews

PagePlus 4  [PC Pro]
COMPANY:	PRICE: £85  (£100 inc VAT)
RATING:	ISSUE: 28  DATE: Dec 96

Unlike Microsoft's Publisher, Serif's PagePlus has always been ostensibly aimed at the DTP user who wants professional results with minimal fuss and cost.

Publisher 97 (reviewed p188) has increased ease of use and some extra Web publishing elements. PagePlus seems to be moving in the right direction too, with more support for professional users, including spot and process colour separation, as well as Pantone colours. But unlike Publisher's Web Site Wizard, PagePlus can't generate HTML code, although it outputs Adobe Acrobat PDF files for others to read on the Web.

Feature-wise, PagePlus is a more of a publishing suite than just a DTP package. Also included is an integrated word processor called WritePlus, a simple art package called LogoPlus and Serif's ArtGallery CD. Between this and LogoPlus, there are 17,000 clip-art images, 550 photos and 400 TrueType fonts in the package.

PagePlus' main screen is extremely well laid out, making extensive use of toolbars and buttons, most of which are context-sensitive. For example, while the toolbars for File, Edit and Publication functions are present, you'll get text tools like style, font, size and effect if you select a text object.

Down the left-hand side of the screen are basic layout tools, including frame, text, picture and simple drawing tools. You can also call WritePlus or LogoPlus from this point, or import a picture from another source.

The drawing tools consist of lines, circles or squares, but these are only intended for creating simple elements on the main page. Loading LogoPlus gives you access to a much wider range of options. The bottom of the PagePlus screen has a range of buttons controlling view options and roll-ups, and there's a colour and shade picker on the right. Size, position and angle information for the selected object is displayed on the status line, and a Status roll-up offers fine control over these values by direct input or nudge buttons.

PagePlus is a frame-based package in that most objects are positioned by placing a frame on the page, and putting your object - text, picture or logo - inside the frame. Simple text, like headlines or captions, can be placed directly on the page without using a frame. Importing text will automatically create frames, and pages if necessary, to fit. A story can be placed into multiple frames, and the link order of the frames can be defined if they aren't intended to be sequential. PagePlus also supports multiple stories within a single publication.

Text will automatically flow around other objects, like frames, but there is manual control over word wrap in case you need it. Text can also be flowed to fit the inside of an object, such as a circle. However, Serif points out that this can cause some unbalanced effects if not used cautiously, and you might need to 'tune' the text in order to get word breaks and hyphenations in the right places.

Layout tools include the usual collection of rulers, grid lines and columns with support for master pages and named styles. Pages can be layered, and repeating elements can be placed in headers and footers. Guides can be added by clicking on the ruler, or moved by clicking and dragging.

Background patterns and watermarks can be applied, and like Publisher, PagePlus directly supports the Paper Direct range of products, with Wizards that show the paper patterns on screen for positional purposes but don't print. You can also set the transparency of page elements to allow other elements to show through.

Logos to go

For creating snazzy logos, you can use LogoPlus. Within LogoPlus are nearly 50 templates to work from, and

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you can also 'tune' the size of the frame you drew by specifying dimensions. Even if you choose a blank page rather than a template, there's a variety of shapes you can draw.

With the starburst, for instance, you have complete control (through buttons) over the number of points, point height, inner point height, twist angle, line thickness, line colour, fill colour, shadow type, shadow colour and so on. Because all of these attributes can be selected so rapidly, and the effect seen instantly, designing quite complex small graphics is startlingly easy.

Adding a new shape adds a layer to the graphic, and other layers are greyed out and inaccessible. This means you can see what you're doing, with everything in context, without being confused. To change layers, all you do is pick a tab down the side of the screen. It's a that shame layers aren't handled as elegantly in DrawPlus itself, where you're limited to moving object by object, using a couple of buttons or menu commands.

I did experience some problems, however. Using one of the default templates I added a starburst. When I closed LogoPlus the graphic didn't fit into a single frame. Instead, DrawPlus flowed the excess into another frame and nothing - not even resizing the original frame - would get my split graphic back into one place. DrawPlus also put an outline of the starburst on one side of the screen, overlapping the menu display. The help didn't give much assistance either.

However, PagePlus does its best to hold your hand through many operations. On creating a text frame, for instance, you're asked a series of questions; for example, whether you want margins, whether you want a background tint, how many columns you want and whether you're going to import or create text.

While it's not a full-blown word processor, WritePlus has enough features to satisfy most needs, including style names, a spelling checker, a thesaurus, autocorrect and word count. It also supports named styles, so you can combine text settings into a simple style and apply them all at once. You can override selected elements of a style definition with local formatting, or specify that style changes are applied globally to text using that style.

Like Publisher, PagePlus has a Clean-Up function that assists you with potential design and printing problems, such as empty frames.

PagePlus has some attractive print functions. In addition to using spot and process colour separations, you can opt to print as a booklet, print file information and crop marks, or suppress pictures. You can also print thumbnail images of multiple pages and define the number of thumbnails per page. Specific combinations of print settings can be given a scheme name and recalled again later.

Like Publisher, though, PagePlus hogs hard disk space. A minimum installation requires 25Mb of disk space, which rises to 65Mb for a typical installation, and a claimed 119Mb with all of the options selected. My install tracker, however, reckons the full custom installation came closer to 145Mb. Of this, some 52Mb is the Wizard collection, and much of the add-on art can be left off the machine and run from CD.

PagePlus is easy to use. Some of the concepts are different from those that are found in other programs and you need to adjust, but I was able to create some impressive documents quickly and easily without using the help system or manuals. This is fortunate, because the help system is actually not much good. On-line help is often brief and lacking in depth, and doesn't look good next to Publisher's.

As with Publisher, printed documentation is minimal. There's a clip-art and font guide that's about an inch thick, and a Companion which introduces the product and gives some guidelines on what you can do with it, as well as explaining the concepts behind DTP. Unfortunately there's very little information given on how the program itself actually works.

If you're looking for a slightly more advanced DTP interface but don't want to cripple yourself financially by going for one of the more expensive packages, then PagePlus is a good buy. It doesn't have the Web publishing frills of Publisher, but for the professional or at least the pro-am user, it's a better choice.

By Phil Evans