There are two types of desktop publishing. There’s the sort you do professionally as a designer or sub-editor, and there’s the sort you dabble with as an aside to your everyday work or hobbies. If you’re a publishing professional, you need Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, simply because that’s what the industry uses and you need to be able to talk the same language and use the same tools as everyone else. If you’re a dabbler, PagePlus is perfect. It’s a fraction of the price and more effective at creating eye-catching layouts when time is short, especially in the hands of non-professionals.

The only problem with programs like PagePlus, traditionally, is that it can be difficult to get your work printed commercially. Specifically, you’re unlikely to find a print bureau willing to print directly from PagePlus files, and although you can export ready-to-print PostScript, it’s not as simple as just pressing a button. But the new PDF authoring tools in PagePlus could narrow the gap between ‘amateur’ and professional packages. Most printers will now work straight from PDFs, and it’s a lot easier to produce a reliable print-ready PDF than it is PostScript – plus, of course, there’s the advantage that you get to see what you’re going to print.

These new PDF tools are a big step forward. Amazingly, you can open any PDF file, created in any other application, and modify the text and graphics within it before exporting it as a new, edited PDF. Previously, that was the territory of dedicated applications such as Adobe Acrobat. True, the formatting and layout options are comparatively limited – the PDF format stores text in small blocks, not long, continuous stories – but it’s enough to allow you to fix errors and adapt designs.

The ability to export PDFs directly isn’t new to this version, but it takes on a new value when you consider the PDF-editing capabilities. In any event PagePlus is an excellent tool for electronic document delivery, never mind print output. This version also includes PDF form tools for electronic information gathering. There’s not much to report on the text-handling front. There was nothing wrong with the previous version in that respect, though the onscreen text rendition then, as now, can look a bit crude. What is new, though, is the level of control you now have over any imported photos.

Image adjustments
Most users will still prefer to edit images in a separate application, but for those who don’t – and for those occasions when you only realise an image needs fixing when you’ve already imported it – there’s an Image Adjustments window that lists almost as many tools as you’d find in a mid-range, image-editor. These include Levels, Curves, Colour Balance, Selective Colour, Channel Mixer and a host of common effects filters. These are added cumulatively in a list in the Image Adjustments window. You can come back later and remove or modify any of them. PagePlus even incorporates a redeye removal tool. If these image-editing options aren’t enough, a button on the toolbar will open the image in Serif PhotoPlus (which has to be bought separately to PagePlus).

This brings us to the redesigned interface. Capable though previous versions of PagePlus might have been, they always had a slightly amateur look about them. PagePlus 11, though, is a different kettle of fish. All the principal palettes are now docked to the right-hand edge of the screen in tabbed sections. Colour, Line, Opacity and Schemes are grouped together, for example, as are Pages, Swatches, Styles and Gallery, and Align, Transform, Character, Layers. Anything else you need appears on a context-sensitive property bar running across the top of the window. This is a big step forward and, in conjunction with a host of new template designs, it does make PagePlus look like a sophisticated and powerful DTP tool in its own right, and not just a budget substitute for the real thing.

Other new features include photo scrapbook templates and a database import wizard for fetching data from Excel and Access. The price includes a Resource CD and a very good printed manual.

PagePlus’s main competition is Microsoft Publisher. With this version, Serif steps comfortably ahead, partly because of its powerful layout, image-editing and drawing tools, but also because of its excellent additional content which, if you include the Resource CD, provides no fewer than 1,250 design templates.