PagePlus 4 review

Logos to go

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