Serif PagePlus 11 Review

Overall Rating

The Serif PagePlus 11 product is solid in terms of stability, and it has a number of good features, which are fine for some applications, but not for designed books. On the surface, the features seem to exist, but once you really try to publish, there are fundamental deficiencies. Having been assured by a pleasant salesperson that the product would handle my book publishing needs, I now need to throw it out and buy something else.

Unfortunately, you cannot break a book into separate files and then generate a .pdf version of the entire book ready for digital printing. Imposition only works on a single file. This means, then, that to publish a book, you need to place all the pages in one file, so the process is incredibly slow and difficult because the files get to be so large, meaning response is impossibly slow.

You cannot do automated reformatting to adjust the page size or to do a global repositioning of text. For example, if you have formatted a document for 8.5" x 11" and want to adjust all the contents to an A4 page, you must adjust every single page in the document. More advanced products, and even PowerPoint have the ability to place a text region on the master page and then move it on the master page to affect all pages in the publication.

PagePlus 11 does not support cross references. So, if you wish to put "see page xxx," the cross reference function mentioned in the documentation does not work. I couldn't get it to work, and when I spoke to support, they said that, indeed, the cross references in PagePlus documentation itself can be erroneous because they are done manually because the feature does not work.

PagePlus index generation does not work properly, according to my experience and Serif support.

Random shifts. There is a bug somewhere in the software that shifts the contents of the pages across files when a table of contents is created. To correct, the user then must correct page by page. Or, you can put the entire book in a single file, and then response time is so slow you can't do the job.

In the text styles, the style called Table of Contents is not the style to select for noting which pieces of text should appear in the table of contents. Undoing this misunderstanding is painful!

DrawPlus is not integrated with PagePlus 11. It is a totally independent program and does not do, as I understood from the salesperson (who probably didn't understand this herself) that if you click on a graphic in PagePlus 11, it does not launch DrawPlus, but if you want to edit a graphic you have to import it into DrawPlus, edit, save, close, open PagePlus, select location, import, adjust etc. And if you want to make further changes, do it all over again. There is no point in purchasing the pair of products.

The support people are pleasant and helpful as a rule, if not always deeply knowledgeable.

This is not a substitute for Quark or Pagemaker. It falls short.