Product Reviews

Back in 1990, Serif PagePlus was the first application to offer Windows-based desktop publishing for less than £100, a role it has continued to fill ever since. In the early days the program's emphasis was very much on usability and fun - at one time it even included a space invaders game. But over the years the power on offer has become just as striking.

To help you get off to a flying start, PagePlus offers a range of over 1,000 page wizards for everything from business and greetings cards to newsletters and posters. Once the preset publication appears, you can quickly update contact details and explore colour variations with the always-onscreen Studio panel's Wizard and Schemes tabs. It's a useful way to begin exploring ideas but, in terms of the choice of publications on offer and the automatic reformatting power, it's still limited compared to main rival Microsoft Publisher.

Where PagePlus begins to outscore Publisher is with its hands-on design power. Features such as the ability to intelligently resize entire sections of text to automatically fill their frame make complex, but common, layout tasks simple. At the same time, the impressive in-built drawing tools and advanced features, such as interactive transparency, filter effects and some particularly impressive 3D handling, all help make your work stand out. In fact, at times PagePlus feels more like a drawing program than a DTP application

Crucially though, this design edge doesn't come at the expense of output options. With the Switch to Web Publishing command you can quickly reformat your print layout for web export (though if you're designing a site from scratch you're better off taking advantage of the bundled Web Plus 8). More importantly, Serif has always recognised the importance of reliably outputting commercial colour-separated print and that this depends on good PostScript support. Since version 8, PagePlus has offered the ability to output publications as PostScript-based Acrobat PDF files. This is a useful publishing medium in its own right, but PDF also acts as the ideal 'digital master' for producing commercial print, a fact that seems to have passed Microsoft by.

PagePlus' long heritage immediately means that new users get a lot for their money, and there's even more to be had in the latest version. Text and image handling lies at the core of all DTP operations and both have been enhanced. PagePlus now supports Unicode, which opens up a huge array of foreign-language and special characters. The WritePlus text editor also now offers drag-and-drop editing and a greatly enhanced Find and Replace, complete with support for formatting, special characters and regular expressions. You can also now remove all text formatting with a single command. Improvements to image handling mean that you can automatically import bitmaps intended

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for web use at 96dpi, while the new Picture toolbar makes it simple to quickly change brightness and contrast, to apply recolour effects and to control size and resolution.

In terms of new layout power, options to set up picture frames as reusable image containers and to automatically fill text frames with dummy text are both helpful for sorting out designs in advance. And when you're working on a frame with overflow text, the new AutoFlow command is particularly handy for automatically adding new similarly sized frames and pages as necessary. You can now split each page into layers and temporarily hide and lock these as required with the new floating Layer Manager, although this would be far more accessible if incorporated into the main Studio area. You can also associate each layer with its own master page. Further boosts to efficiency come from three new clipboard controls: Paste in Place, which makes it easier to align objects; Paste Format, which lets you quickly copy existing formatting; and Paste Format Plus, which gives you a choice of copied attributes to apply.

The feature that Serif is making most of in this latest release, though, is PagePlus 10's new support for multichapter books. This is managed through the new BookPlus utility, which lets you load and reorder multiple existing publications to create a single project. You can then 'synchronise' the resulting book to apply the formatting of one chapter throughout, renumber its pages, add a table of contents and index, and output the whole publication to paper or PDF. Alongside the addition of footnote and endnote capabilities, it's clear that Serif is now targeting the creation of longer documents as well as its current design-intensive publications. The power is impressive power and a useful option, but not enough to tempt regular technical authors from truly dedicated programs such as Corel Ventura and Adobe FrameMaker.

Another area of surprising power in PagePlus is its mail-merge capability, which has been given a major overhaul. You can now read, filter and sort data from a whole host of sources including HTML tables, most database formats (including Serif's own), and even live ODBC servers. And since fields are no longer limited to text and elements can be set to repeat on the page, you can merge images and text to produce graphical catalogue-style publications. More simply, you can convert a folder of photos to a data source in order to produce photo albums.

When it comes to final output, PagePlus 10 sees some further tweaks. For web publishing, there's new support for separate backgrounds for individual pages and the ability to use QuickButton shapes as graphical links. For PDF output you can now set up hyperlinks directly, automatically generate bookmark lists and optimise your files for faster web downloading.

All this makes PagePlus easy to use, surprisingly powerful and excellent value - but this needs to be kept in perspective. For professional publishers the cost of their DTP application is relatively small compared to their time costs and especially the costs involved if things go wrong. Because of that, PagePlus will need to prove itself in the commercial printing arena before we could recommend it over its peers. Nonetheless, if your budget is tight and you're producing the vast majority of your work in-house with just the occasional foray into commercial print, PagePlus 10 is a great option.