Serif Pageplus X5 desktop publishing software

Serif Pageplus X5 is a relatively cheap desktop publishing program (professional desktop publishing software usually costs several hundred pounds) with good features for home users.

It includes more than 800 templates suitable for everyday publishing projects including stationery, brochures, calendars, invitations, menus, greetings cards and newsletters, but it also incorporates enough proper design features to make it attractive for the occasional professional project – for instance it can save publications in formats that printing houses use.

The templates are highly customisable, which means it's relatively straightforward to add your own design twist to what's already there – and because the templates come in sets, the design elements are consistent across many different kinds of publication.

Over the years, Serif has added all sorts of extra features into Pageplus so it now incorporates a photo editor, excellent word processing, the ability to edit and save PDF files and a decent drawing tools (particularly for creating logos and cutting people or objects out of photos). The new version builds on this rather than adding any real razzle-dazzle but there are still substantial improvements.

Fans of attractive text can now use many of the extra features included with Opentype fonts (for example when two letters are joined with a visual link called a ligature), which will transform the look of many documents, while improved cross-referencing means that elements referring to pictures, panels and tables are automatically updated whenever you alter the structure of a publication.

Elsewhere, Serif has added support for Word 2010 documents so you can just bring them straight into your publication. In terms of graphics, the new version includes better colour management, including a colour scheme designer for creating a harmonious palette of colours, which we found very easy to use. There are new fancier fill options for shapes and it allows for finer adjustment of the way text wraps around pictures.

It's also now possible to use both landscape and portrait pages in a single publication. Added together, these enhancements will help produce neater, more polished layouts in your publications.

There are also improvements to how the program looks. Items ‘glow' when the mouse pointer is hovered over them, which indicates that they can be edited, the rotating tool has been re-jigged so it's harder to move something round by mistake, and the layers tab has been re-designed to make it much easier to navigate around complex, layered publications.

If you are using an older version of Serif Pageplus, the new features in Pageplus X5 aren't particularly different, but there is enough here to make it a worthwhile upgrade. For new users, the way it combines ease of use and genuine publishing power make it easy to recommend for home and small business use.