Twelve years ago, Serif Pageplus was one of the first budget Windows desktop publishing applications, competing with Timeworks (now GSP) and Microsoft Publisher. Whereas the last of these concentrated on hand-holding the beginner, Serif aimed higher, with professional features such as colour separations, Pantone libraries and manual kerning of letter pairs.

Since then, Serif has continued to add features: the early versions were only suitable for short publications as you couldn't flow text between frames, but this was soon rectified, as was the lack of indexing, table-of-contents and other long-document essentials. Later versions added accuracy of placement to one-tenth of a point or degree; separate story and table editors; drawing tools; transparency effects; in-house photo-enhancement and more.

So, what's new this time? As usual there's a lot in the package. Our review copy came on two CDs, with over 300 fonts, 260 fills and textures, 600 animated gifs for web publishing and 600 wizards. There's less clip-art than in previous versions, but given that this was a triumph of quantity over quality perhaps that's not such a bad thing. As well as a 150-page paper 'companion' there's an excellent set of tutorials, covering everything from the basics of placing frames and images; wrapping text to graphics; effects like dropped shadows and specialised tasks such as mail-merging or creating numbered tickets.

There's been a general smartening-up of the interface, with sleeker buttons and some new features. To the right of the screen is the Studio, which has tabbed buttons to access everything from an individual object's attributes to colour schemes, clip-art and ready-made coupons or logos. To the left are the tools for creating items such as frames, free-range text and drawing objects, as well as those for applying special effects such as transparency. At the top are standard-looking formatting and zooming controls. Finally, the free-floating Change Bar, which has been with Pageplus since early days, lets you adjust the size, position and other attributes of text and objects with numerical precision.

There have been several enhancements in the drawing and text-tweaking tools. You now have several ways of fitting a line of text to a curved path, and you can apply instant 3D effects to text, complete with lighting, extrusion and shadows. A Mesh Warp tool lets you stretch any object - text included - in various directions by manipulating its 'envelope'. Just as with mainstream drawing applications, you can convert both text and shape objects to curves, for low-level editing. You can also make a frame (text container) out of any shape, including letters you have converted to shapes, which can make for some interesting experimental effects but probably won't enhance the legibility of your work.

The big news in this version is that you can create Adobe Acrobat (pdf) files directly from Pageplus, complete with Pagehints (pop-up annotations), bookmarks and hyperlinks, so you can have 'live' tables of contents and cross-references. This version also supports ICC profiles, so images imported from a profiled scanner can be printed as accurately as possible on a profiled printer.

In general, the quality of the resources has improved. The numerous wizards and colour schemes, while not quite up to the level of Microsoft Publisher in terms of elegance, are a lot better than they have been.

The weak point is the selection of fonts. Many of these should come with a 'Display only - do not set more than five words at once' health warning, but it's not just the display and 'fun' typefaces that are hard on the eye. The essential point of DTP software is that it should set body type in a legible and harmonious manner. Many of the typefaces supplied for body text - even those used in the wizards - show poor spacing in print and a lack of 'hinting' makes them look very ragged on screen. This is a shame as it lets down the otherwise excellent page-layout and artistic features of Pageplus 9.

Contact: Serif 0115 914 2000
www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplus9

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