Product Reviews

Serif's PagePlus desktop publishing software is a favourite of ours. Version 10 won a Best Buy award for home and small business use in our DTP round-up in Shopper November 2005. We felt it was excellent value compared with high-end products from Adobe and Quark. This latest version costs the same as predecessor. We also like the way Serif packs the software with user guides and templates to help even novices get professional results, so we were keen to see what Serif had added to tempt us to upgrade.

The most useful new feature is the ability to import and edit PDFs directly. This is essential as PDF has become the most common way of sharing documents, so it will be welcomed by everyone who works with this type of file. Working with PDFs is like working with any other type of PagePlus document. You can open them, work on text and graphics and save your changes while retaining the formatting of the original document. Then you can share the results with others without the need for third-party PDF software.

If you import PDFs from other sources, you may face the issue of missing fonts. PagePlus resolves this by using

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automatic font substitution. It also offers you the option of remapping fonts manually at a later date with the Resource Manager. The Serif Font Map files store your preferred substitutions, which you can export for use with other PagePlus documents.

As well as being able to edit PDF documents from within PagePlus 11, you can now use the software to create and publish PDF forms. This means you can design your own membership or survey form and share it with others over email or the web. For extra security, forms can be certified by the author and signed by the recipient.

People who work with foreign language text have always been well supported by PagePlus; version 10 included Unicode support and the ability to design using foreign languages, special fonts and symbols. Version 11 expands on this, and can cope with multiple-language documents. It comes with 14 dictionaries, including German, French, Spanish and Italian. This means you can mark up parts of document with a language and the spellchecker will automatically check them in the correct language.

Other areas that have been revamped in version 11 include image adjustments, which includes a new red-eye correction tool, and tables, as you can now use a database import wizard to upload information automatically from databases. Enhanced photo scrapbook pages allow you to turn your images into printed documents. A new user interface brings frequently used tools to your fingertips with the addition of dockable Studio tabs, offering single-click access to settings such as line, opacity and colour.

If you do a lot of PDF work, Serif PagePlus 11 is an excellent choice. However, owners of previous versions probably won't need to upgrade.