Serif Pageplus X4

Pageplus X4 is the latest version of Serif’s cheap desktop publishing (DTP) program, which does a fine job of bridging the gap between home and professional-level DTP.

It is capable of producing many different types of printed publications, such as cards, invitations and certificates to flyers, posters, catalogues and stationery, as well as offering the ability to save them as web pages, complete with links, rollovers and so on.

This version adds a number of useful new features. It’s better at importing and exporting PDFs, which makes it great for distributing documents electronically, and now imports files created with Word 2007 or Openoffice. There’s a built-in image editor with dozens of filters and quick-fix adjustments for improving dodgy photos or enhancing them with special effects. It also includes a wide range of photo-realistic resizable frames that can be put around your photos on the page.

Serif has made a welcome re-jig of the interface which adds browser-style tabs that make it easier to have more than one publication open at once. A start-up wizard alongside the template chooser offers video tutorials, PDF beginners’ guides, help and support. As always, templates are key to getting started quickly with Pageplus and the X4 edition includes hundreds on the two supplied DVDs, divided into themes as well as categories like publications, business forms, stationery and more.

Anyone into the finer points of page design will appreciate the new anchoring feature which allows users to affix any kind of object (picture, text, graphic) relative to a particular piece of text so that they’ll always stay together even if other elements are inserted into the page. In addition it’s easier to fine-tune text spacing to produce neater and better-fitting body text, captions, quotes and headlines.

Although packed with features, Pageplus X4 does a creditable job of organising toolbars, palettes and dialogues in a logical way and it’s even possible to choose which elements are displayed on screen.

Newcomers will appreciate the How To setting which displays a panel of running hints and tutorials that change depending on what you do.

Complete newcomers may find the learning curve a bit daunting, but the results are worth it.