PagePlus Reviewer's Comments

Our second pick and "TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award Winner" is PagePlus by Serif. If you're looking for a reasonably priced desktop publishing program to edit and lay out material, then PagePlus offers some great tools for creating professional-looking publications.

Serif developed this software for the computer novice and the expert alike—with a handy control panel, creating quality publishing documents is made easy for anyone. Though PagePlus doesn't include as many templates as the Gold Award Winning product, we feel it has sufficient to meet your publishing needs.

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Ease of Use:  

Once you become familiar with PagePlus, it's quite easy to use. However, for the novice user, we feel PagePlus may take a little playing around to become familiar with all the different tools you have for creating publishing documents

The top toolbar includes options to adjust text and page qualities as well as open, save, and print documents. The left toolbar provides tools for working with text, images, shapes, drawing tools and effects. The right tool bar is for changing the attributes of documents, viewing pages, color schemes and adding object styles.

Projects:  

PagePlus easily handles long catalogues and books by setting styles for text and objects, as well as setting color schemes to match master pages across multiple publications.

One of the features we really liked about PagePlus is BookPlus, which makes it easy to build a book. Features include adding a table of contents and index page and creating the different chapters.

Photo/Graphic Tools:  

The graphic/image tools included in PagePlus are excellent. Besides the standard tools for resizing and correcting color and contrast, PagePlus has tools to add 3—D effects, transparencies and filter effects.

The filter effects you can create with PagePlus are among the best we've seen. Some of the filter effects include an inner or drop shadow, inner or outer glows, bevel and emboss effects, feather effects and 3—D or 2—D effects.

Text Tools:  

Very few of the desktop publishing programs we reviewed allow you to take your text beyond basic shapes; PagePlus is the exception. Using the included tools, you can shape your text around almost anything. Using the freehand, straight-line and curved tools, you can create a custom shape and then add your text to it. This is ideal for curving text around circular shapes.

Printing/Sharing:  

Along with the ability to save your files in PDF format, PagePlus also gives you tips and provides a wizard for preparing your document for professional printing.

Besides the general printing options, you can set your layout, separations for color, prepress file information, crop marks, registration targets and more.

Help/Support:  

PagePlus provides some excellent help resources, including helpful tutorials and a user's guide. You can also visit Serif's website and view a knowledge base, FAQs, submit an email request form or contact support by phone.

Summary:  

Overall, we really liked PagePlus and the variety of options it offers. Not only does it include professional-looking templates, it also has great tools for working with larger documents such as books and catalogues.

With a few more templates and images, tools for fixing flaws in image features, complete stationary templates and marketing tools for business, PagePlus could easily be the number one product.