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Serif PagePlus X2
Price: £99 inc VAT

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 26/04/2007
Featured in magazine:
Issue 160
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Serif
Tel: 0800 376 7070
Web Address: www.serif.com


Serif's PagePlus software has been offering PC users a cost-effective route into desktop publishing for more years than we care to remember. This latest version can handle web publishing technologies such as PDF files as well as it can create a printed page, and offers more flexibilty for amateur designers looking to publish material for their local club, school or charity, for example.

Features
The software offers a lot of detailed features and you can basically use as many or as few as you want. Templates and wizards abound for getting started, and creating simple page layouts is reasonably straightforward. Breaking through the surface and exploring the menus reveals incredible depth, offering complete control over your publication. Most of the things you might want to do in print are included somewhere, though finding them can take a bit of work. The results make it worthwhile though, and you can simply print your finished work or output it to a wide range of formats, including PDF files and HTML emails.

Performance
As with most creative software, your publications can only be as good as your design skills allow. The software should provide most reasonably creative people the ability to produce good-quality publications. What you probably shouldn't be doing is using the program to create websites. Although it'll certainly fudge this for you, we found that blocks of text were being converted into images, which will do a fair job of recreating your publication online, but isn't going to attract any attention from search engines.

Ease of use
This software is snapping at the heels of professional packages so there's a negative impact on its ease of use, simply because there are so many features to learn to use. However, you'll find that it's powerful and reasonably intuitive, especially if you're already familiar with more complicated word and image-processing software. Someone looking for a simple program for basic layouts is likely to get bogged down in the features, though it's worth persevering with the manual and tutorials if you're serious, as a lot of the basics are covered.

Value for money
A price tag of £100 might sound like a lot of money, but PagePlus has few rivals at a similar price. Many of the features expected in professional packages are present, at a fraction of the cost: Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress are at least seven times the price. Although there are obviously elements lacking in this software that you'll find in something more expensive, the basics are all present and, for the price, you get an unprecedented level of control over your pages.

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