Serif PagePlus 11

Even if you don't have professional image-editing software, though, there are sophisticated tweaking tools inside PagePlus itself, including curves, saturation and a range of blurs that should meet most basic needs.

Colour management is handled on a system level, with PagePlus integrating any previously installed ICC profiles and making them available for use in either RGB or CMYK colour spaces, as well as giving an option to colour manage on the basis of an installed local printer profile.

It's equally at home outputting PDF files in the form of PDF/X-1 and /X-1a for sending to a professional printer, with the output optionally bearing crop and registration marks, colour and density calibration bars and file information. Bleed can be customised to within one-tenth of a millimetre, images downsampled, fonts embedded and spot colours retained. A basic preflighting process will warn you about potential output problems, such as low-resolution images, before they become costly mistakes, too.

With a PDF engine in place, Serif has also incorporated PDF forms, with a series of simple dialogs that allow you to add input boxes that feed back data by email or drop it into an online database. If you don't have your own facilities for gathering this information (traditionally CGI scripts on a web server), you can use Serif's own online service, which will gather data from published forms and send it on to the email address of your choice.

In essence, you have just about everything you need to publish professional multipage documents quickly and easily, regardless of your experience or abilities. We can't believe PagePlus will ever unseat QuarkXPress or InDesign for professional page layout. But we'd still strongly urge businesses for which publishing isn't their core money-maker to look seriously at PagePlus - it's likely to save you a lot of cash.

Author: Nik Rawlinson