Serif PagePlus X5 review

PagePlus brings the capabilities of programs like QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign down to an affordable price; giving everyone the tools to produce polished documents for commercial printing or PDF distribution. And while desktop publishing may seem specialised, a DTP app is more flexible than Word or PowerPoint any time you want to slap some text and pictures together.

Installing X5 is straightforward, and if you’re upgrading from X4 you can import your custom content and settings. The number of ready-made templates has grown substantially, with 40 theme sets providing matched letterheads, labels, posters, brochures and more. Unfortunately, some look as if they’ve been put together hastily and include schoolboy errors such as text wrapping around both sides of an image. Nevertheless, the overall standard is fairly decent, and multiple page layouts are supplied for newsletters. A new Pro Template Pack for X5 offers a handful of particularly cool designs, although they may prove too specific to adapt easily to your company’s needs; a dozen further packs are available for £8 each or £25 the set.

There’s also plenty of scope for expressing your own creativity. Additional fills, outlines and transparency features let you draw more complex graphics within the app, and the new Colour Scheme Designer helps pick effective combinations using established colour wheel principles. Colour management, an important professional feature that’s gradually filtered into PagePlus, now respects the profile stored with each imported image, and you can output to industry standard PDF/X1-a files. If you use your own desktop printer, the revamped Print Preview supports imposition, so it’s easy, for example, to output an A5 booklet on A4 sheets ready to fold.

We’re equally pleased to see subtle improvements to ease of use. The Layers tab now lists objects for easy reference and selection, and master items are shown within their own layer, which can be brought to the front on a given page if they need to appear over others. Multiple masters can be assigned to each page, which serves a similar purpose to InDesign’s nested master pages: you can create a universal master for headers and footers, plus masters for adding page furniture for individual sections or chapters.

Another feature inspired by more expensive competitors is text variables. Repeated phrases, such as a product name or magazine issue date, can be set up and then edited in one place to change them throughout a document. You can also insert cross-references to specified items or to the next or previous frame in a text chain, creating links such as ‘continued on page x’ that update automatically.

A few basic layout features are still missing. For example, there’s no baseline grid option to ensure lines of body text stay aligned across columns. Although some users will appreciate them, we’re not so excited by enhancements to PDF editing and web publishing; PDFs were never intended to be editable, and a DTP app is not the best place to design web pages. Instead, it would have been nice to see eBook creation features for the EPUB format used by mobile readers, which would support Serif’s claim to handle all types of documents.

Overall, however, we’re impressed that an already capable application, which is updated more regularly than its high-end rivals, can still deliver so much for so little.