Serif PagePlus 9

Importantly, PDF support extends to certain on-screen functions suitable for electronic documents. You can preserve active hyperlinks from PagePlus when exporting to PDF and set bookmarks using the new Bookmarks Manager palette. Annotations can be added in the form of PageHints, and it's possible to produce island spreads (facing pages) within the PDF simply by ticking Impose Pages. Serif should be praised for its PDF implementation in PagePlus 9: it now has the most complete and up-to-date set of PDF export features included free with any page layout program other than Adobe InDesign.

It's not all perfection, of course. There remain a few user interface issues that we've felt uncomfortable with for many years. These include the way docked palettes seem to occupy an unnecessarily enormous amount of screen space, and the drag-and-drop ruler guides, that seem to work in precisely the opposite manner to those in every other program under the sun. Also irritating is the fact that the Resource Manager window automatically closes after carrying out a task instead of staying on-screen just in case you want to repeat it.

But these are minor problems in an otherwise first-rate package. PagePlus might have lost its way in the mid-1990s, but version 9 has brought it back with a vengeance.

Author: Alistair Dabbs