PagePlus 11

PagePlus was one of the first desktop publishing packages to enter the market. It has since suffered the effects of the huge amounts of cash spent on big name competitors such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, but it still remains a major player in the lower end of the market.

Serif’s target is not the big publishers, but those who need to create promotional literature online and on paper. The company has concentrated on making good page design accessible to those working on occasional design jobs rather than design professionals, but PagePlus still offers a slightly more grownup toolset than Microsoft Publisher.

PagePlus is all about simplicity and, although there are rows of icons and controls, the basic rules are clear and the built-in templates will get you started in no time.

New in version 11 are the abilities to load, edit and save PDF documents. There’s also a new feature for colour correcting and adjusting the levels of images without taking them out of the document, and a few blurs and other effects have also been included. In addition, multiple language versions of documents can be produced using 12 new foreign dictionaries.

The ability to work with Access databases and Excel spreadsheets will keep business users happy, while regular users will be impressed by the interface, which now offers neat tabs containing context-sensitive controls.