Serif PagePlus 10 review

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.

Author: Tom Arah