Serif PagePlus X4 review

It may lack the glamour of video editing, but desktop publishing (DTP) is still one of the most complex creative tasks your PC can tackle, and PagePlus makes it remarkably accessible.

It's a tenth of the price of the market leaders, QuarkXPress 8 and Adobe InDesign CS4, yet, like them, it lets you lay out any type of document, then output your work either to a desktop printer, a PDF file or a commercial press. Now it even includes comprehensive photo editing tools.

The start-up wizard offers dozens of videos and tutorials in the new Learning Zone, starting a document from scratch, or choosing from an expanded range of templates. Twenty new themed sets give you matching brochure, business card, flyer, newsletter and poster designs. Many of these look decent, but they're limited; for example, the newsletters work only in a one-page format.

If you're prepared to put the work in from scratch, all the layout tools you need are here, from master pages to transparency effects. InDesign users will find numerous features familiar, and in many cases Serif takes them further - for example, adding 3D effects to InDesign-like 2D filters such as drop shadows, and allowing you to apply mesh warps to items within a layout (something Adobe reserves for its Illustrator drawing program).

Also new in X4 is the ability to combine elements by adding and subtracting, which should enable you to create any shape you need. For more complex artwork, the Gallery palette offers thousands of clip-art images, all supplied as editable vector objects, many with trendy shiny glass effects. Among these are great new 'flashes' for price stickers and pull quotes.

Dynamic Guides now help neatly you position elements by telling you when they're aligned. However, they don't reveal when items are equally spaced, like Adobe's Smart Guides, which slows up layouts involving grids of images. A picture can be anchored to text, so it will automatically move to the next page if the story runs over, and table styles can be saved for re-use, aiding the laborious job of laying out tables and calendars.

You can specify minimum and maximum letter spacing in auto-justified text, which is essential for typesetting. Word-processing improvements, such as the ability to reveal tabs and paragraph breaks, make it easier to edit text within the program, while support for Office 2007 files aids import from existing documents.

You can also import layouts directly from PDF files, something we haven't seen before. This works reasonably well, but it isn't a desirable way to transfer content and usually requires a lot of manual patching-up. More significant is the ability to export your own layouts as press-quality PDFs for commercial printing. Prepress controls are limited but adequate, and support for both Acrobat 5 and the primitive but popular PDF/X-1a standard should give you a fair chance of getting your documents printed correctly. If you're printing them yourself, the improved Duplex Printing Wizard helps output multi-page booklets correctly. You can also create and edit PDF forms, which is an ideal way to share documents that you want users to fill in onscreen.

PhotoLab, a built-in image editor, looks at first like the simplified correction tools found in photo-organising applications, but closer inspection reveals a surprisingly generous range of tonal adjustments, as well as a varied and genuinely useful set of creative effects, all customisable and undoable. Our only gripes were that some functions didn't work quite the way we'd expected, and previewing could be slow. It complements existing image-handling features, including X3's Cutout Studio, which helps you accurately separate an item from its background and flow text around it.