PagePlus 5 review

In the past, Serif's DTP package PagePlus was very much aimed at the budget-conscious home and home-office user. Now it's raised its sights and is also turning its attention to what it terms the 'growing business'. In fact, the latest version even has a professional edition subtitle. Rather than simply competing with old enemy Microsoft Publisher, PagePlus seems keen to take the challenge upmarket.

Despite the shift in emphasis, the program is still firmly built on ease of use and the principle of producing results quickly. In particular, the provision of more than 300 Page Wizards is designed to give you a flying start. Select from the broad range of categories including brochures or business stationery, choose a general mood such as modern or traditional, enter various details like your name and address, and PagePlus will cook up a layout to the given recipe.

The active help continues as you work on the project. Draw a text frame to flow your text into, for example, and the Frame Wizard pops up to ask how many columns you want, what size margins and whether you want a background fill. The new Calendar Wizard is another typical example. Drag on screen and the Wizard materialises to find out which month to view and what style to present it in, and then creates the appropriate OLE graphic to the correct size. Double-click on the graphic and the Wizard is launched again to enable updating.

With Wizards, QuickTours and serious and not-so-serious tool hints constantly appearing, help is always going to be at hand. The latest version of PagePlus still prides itself on being as 'friendly as a puppy', but thankfully it also recognises that some people have an aversion to dogs. If the constant stream of Wizards and tips irritate you, you can selectively turn them off or simply choose to disable the 'fun stuff'. A more fundamental advance, though, is the overall improvement in the quality of on-line help.

Another example of PagePlus's more sober approach is the ChangeBar. When this control palette first appeared it was treated as something of a toy. If you were formatting a heading, for example, you could drag sliders to change not just the point size and text width, but the actual typeface - not exactly high-level design, but a lot of fun. That capability has now disappeared, and although the sliders are still there, a separate tab encourages precise values to be set. A new tab has also been added that gives complete control over the size and positioning of both text and graphics.

The ChangeBar is more professional and powerful than it was previously, but it still has limitations. It doesn't offer access to all formatting commands, for example, so to change case or apply a text fill it's still necessary to call up the Character dialog. This wouldn't be too bad, but for some reason the dialog took a full 35 seconds to appear on my reasonably fast system. More irritatingly, the ChangeBar is the only way to control baseline jump. This means that a basic task like superscripting or subscripting must be done individually, by manually setting both point size and positioning. At least this is an advance on version 4 where the capability had completely vanished.

The ChangeBar is also used for accessing a new capability, intelligent text fitting. Often in a design you'll have a set amount of space that you want to fill. This copy fitting can often be laborious, involving repeated fine-tuning until the desired result is achieved. With PagePlus it can all be done instantly and automatically. The feature undoubtedly works, but the fixed order of first changing point size, leading and then paragraph spacing is contrary to the way a professional designer would tackle the job.