Serif PagePlus X2 review

Taking most of its features from Adobe and Quark, PagePlus couldn't be accused of wild innovation - but there's nothing wrong with that.

If you've used DTP software before, you'll feel at home. If not, there's plenty of help to get you started, which is unique in this field.

We were pleased with Serif's templates compared with Microsoft's. While quantity is more limited, quality is commendable. Options include calendars, complete with the ability to add your own red-letter days to the standard holidays. There's also some good photo clip art. Templates are divided into desktop printing and commercial printing categories, the latter featuring multi-page formats with full bleed, where the graphics go to the edges of the page.

PDF creation is reasonably convincing, with presets such as the PDF/X-1 standards, which are widely used to ensure compatibility when sending layouts to print or submitting advertising copy to magazines and newspapers. Unlike its pricier rivals, PagePlus includes imposition, which is the arrangement of pages on to a larger sheet ready to print and fold. Commercial printers do their own imposition, but this is handy for printing small booklets on a desktop printer.

Colours are converted to CMYK by default, bypassing the common error of leaving non-process colours in your output (which won't print), and you can also use spots. However, some advanced output controls, including transparency flattening, are limited and poorly documented, so we wouldn't be as confident supplying press-ready PDFs from this as we would from QuarkXPress or InDesign.

The interface is well designed. As in InDesign CS3, the Pages palette shows thumbnails of your layouts rather than blank symbols. There's a handy Media Bar on to which you can drag images before placing them on a page. Master pages are adequately supported, and while you don't get InDesign's nesting capability you can apply a master to each layer on a page. There are table-of-contents and indexing features, mailmerge and (as with Adobe and Quark) the facility to create a book consisting of multiple layout files. Typographic control is good, complete with optical justification, where margins are made to look straighter by taking character shapes into account; InDesign has this feature, but not QuarkXPress.

You get soft shadows as flexible as Quark's and effects as plentiful as Adobe's, plus an unrivalled variety of ready-made texture and 3D effects. Serif's unusual transparency masking can be unwieldy for simple opacity adjustments, but it enables some unique results.

PagePlus has much to recommend it, and few serious flaws. It won't satisfy dedicated publishers or graphics agencies; some important features are absent, such as support for vector clipping paths on images, and you can expect some sucking of teeth when submitting files to printers. Still, it's outrageously cheap, and you can tackle a wide range of everyday DTP tasks without too steep a learning curve.