Key features

Before you get started with PagePlus, we recommend you take the opportunity to familiarize yourself with PagePlus key features and capabilities.

Layout

  • Versatile Setup with Auto-Imposition
    Just click to specify layouts for small (business cards and labels), folded (booklets and greetings cards), and large publications (banners and posters)!

  • Ready-to-use Design Templates
    Fancy a quick route to produce stunning designs for home or business use? Adopt one of an impressive collection of eye-catching design templates.

  • Theme layout design templates
    Choose a theme on which to base your publication! Each theme offers a choice of publication types (Brochure, Business Card, Flyer, Newsletter, or Poster) and differently designed layout options for the theme. Pick multiple layouts as your new pages, then simply fill picture placeholders with your own pictures.

  • Master Pages
    Save time and maintain consistency by using multiple master pages assigned to your publication pages.

  • Layers
    Each page can have multiple layers—so you can assign elements to different layers for modular design.

  • Professional layout tools
    Movable rulers, guide lines and a dot grid, as layout aids, help you position objects precisely; snapping jumps an object to guide or grid. Use Sticky guides, a great way of moving (in bulk) all objects snapped to your guide lines—move the guide and objects will follow! Align and resize to objects using Dynamic guide snapping.

  • Page control
    Add
    and remove pages in just a few clicks of your mouse in the Pages tab. Drag and drop pages within the tab to reorder sequence. Assign master pages to several document pages at once. To view pages, Multi-page view lets you see an array of pages, even show a facing pages view!

  • Mail & Photo Merge
    With Mail and Photo Merge, read data from just about any source: tables from HTML web pages, database files, even live ODBC servers! Print to labels and letters equally.

  • Tables and Calendars
    Choose from a range of preset formats or design your own table. Use the convenient Table context toolbar to sort data, format cells, and choose from a wide range of functions for spreadsheet calculations. Calendars are table-based for enhanced functionality, and support Year update, inline personal events, and public holidays! Even create your own savable table and calendar AutoFormats.

  • BookPlus
    Treat separate PagePlus publication files as chapters and use the BookPlus utility to link them into a book! Assign text styles and color palettes across publications, automatically generate an Index or Table of Contents, add page numbering and output your final long document to both print and PDF.

Pictures

  • Import Pictures
    Import commonly-used standard file formats, including RAW digital camera formats. AutoFlow pictures (or drag and drop) from the always-at-hand Media Bar into sequential picture frames! Import Adobe® Photoshop® files directly into your PagePlus publications.

  • Image Adjustments
    Apply adjustments (Brightness, Contrast, fix red eye, and more) or use Edit in PhotoPlus, which accesses Serif’s award-winning photo-editing package (if installed).

  • PhotoLab for non-destructive adjustment and effect filters
    The powerful PhotoLab studio packs a punch with an impressive selection of editable adjustments, creative, and artistic effects (pencil, water color, oil, and more). Use integrated Straighten, Crop, Red-eye, and Spot-repair tools for easy retouching. Apply filters to selected areas of your photo by using brush-based masking. Save adjustment/effect combinations as favorites for future use.

  • Quick-and-easy Image Cutouts
    Image Cutout Studio
    makes light work of cutting out your placed pictures, directly in PagePlus. Use brushes to discard uniform backgrounds (sky, walls, etc.) or keep subjects of interest (people, objects, etc.).

  • A versatile Metafile Format
    Import
    and Export Serif Metafiles (.SMF), a proprietary image format with improvements to the Windows Metafile format (WMF). Better line, fill, and text definitions make them ideal for sharing graphics between Serif applications.

Creative

  • Drawing Tools
    Design stunning vector graphics with Pencil, Pen and Straight Line tools, and add line endings like arrowheads, diamonds, and quills. Alternatively, the array of fully-customizable QuickShapes let you quickly create outlines for your designs, while Convert to Curves, Crop to Shape, and curve drawing offer complete flexibility for creating any shape imaginable! Mesh warp envelopes add perspective, slant, and bulge to any object. Join object outlines to create more complex outlined objects.

  • Fills
    Enhance shapes and artistic text with fantastic professional fills. Use the Color tab to change fill, line, or text color with one click. Choose preset fills (solid, gradient, or bitmap) from the Swatches tab’s palettes—even create stunning bitmap fills from your own images. What’s more, every color used is added to the Publication Palette so that you can easily re-use it again and again.

  • Intelligent Color Schemes
    Choose from dozens of preset color schemes to change the overall appearance of your publications with a single click. You can customize the scheme colors, create brand new schemes, and apply any scheme to a “from-scratch” publication.

  • Ready-to-use Styles
    Choose various filter effects, glows, shadows, textures, and materials from the Styles tab. Customize the preset styles or store your own!

  • Transparency
    Add transparency to your backgrounds, text frames, tables, shapes and text to achieve a truly professional look. As with color fills, you can apply solid, gradient, and bitmap transparencies—even create bitmap transparencies from your own image collection.

  • Filter Effects
    Apply eye-catching Filter Effects to make your images and text really stand out. Easily add shadows, glows, bevels, blurs, reflections, outlines, feathering, or embossing effects and alter the flexible settings for exactly the right look—your original object remains intact and editable if you change your mind! Use the Shadow Tool for on-the-page control of basic or skewed drop shadows.

  • Astounding 3D Lighting and Surface Effects
    Advanced algorithms bring flat shapes to life! Choose one or more effects, then vary surface and multiple colored light source properties. Start with a pattern or a function, adjust parameters for incredible surface contours, textures, fills, realistic-looking wood, water, skin, marble and much more. Combine 3D transparency and Reflection Maps for realistic glass-like effects on non-reflective/reflective surfaces.

  • Instant 3D
    Transform your artistic text and shapes into impressive 3D objects directly on the page! Apply multiple colored lighting effects (with directional control), along with custom bevel and lathe effect profiles to create your very own unique contours.

  • Connector Tools
    Easily design organizational charts, family trees and other diagrams—connectors will link your boxes, circles, or other shapes together, with links being maintained during any object repositioning.

  • Stunning logos and flashes
    Use the Gallery tab for a range of  pre-designed ready-to-go logos and flashes—alternatively, create from scratch in LogoStudio or base your design on existing PagePlus objects! Use flashes for advertising on your website, on a poster, or a greetings card.

  • Photo-based borders
    Exciting new ready-to-go borders can be applied around text frames, tables and pictures alike. Create and save custom borders from your own electronic border designs or scanned picture frames! The Gallery tab’s Picture frames have the same borders already applied.

Text

  • Import text power!
    Add word processing content to any text frame—Word 2007 (and earlier versions), Open Office, Rich Text Format, PagePlus’s WritePlus, and many more text formats.

  • Text Frames
    Compose story text in text frames then easily position, rotate or size the frame to suit; connected frames host the same story text and can be filled automatically by AutoFlow or manual text fitting. Enhanced text wrap options and separate crop and wrap outlines mean you have greater control over where text flows and how it appears. Import, paste, export text in Unicode format… design with a foreign-language or special fonts and characters. Text paths also benefit from intelligent text fitting.

  • Anchor any object
    Anchor pictures, shapes, tables, artistic text, and nested text frames to your publication’s artistic or frame text. Position horizontally and vertically in relation to anchor point, indented text, column, frame, page margin guides, or the whole page. Flow text around floating objects in your text frame.

  • Text Control
    Apply text formatting from an on-hand text context toolbar; apply multi-level bullet and numbering schemas to your paragraphs, even to your text styles; a Text Styles tab for allocating text attributes to chosen paragraphs; flexible bullet, numbering and indenting buttons; and much more!

  • Fonts
    Substitute missing fonts
    when opening third-party publications or PDFs. View your currently installed font set in the Fonts tab, including those most recently assigned to text, favorite fonts, and those considered Websafe. Hover over a listed font for an “in-situ” font preview of your selected text—simply click to apply the new font if you like it! Easily swap all selected instances of a common font for another font in one fell swoop!

  • Frame and Artistic Text
    Create text with stunning transparency effects, gradient/bitmap (photo) fills, 2D/3D effects and more. Use designer artistic text for high impact headlines and powerful design elements—artistic text scales, flips, and can follow a drawn path, while frame text flows and line wraps.

  • Find & Replace
    Search through story text for words and phrases but also text attributes, particular fonts, colors, special character
    s (Unicode), regular expressions, and words at specific positions in sentences.

  • Text Composition Tools
    Includes word count,spell-checking, thesaurus, and proof reader. Auto-Correct and Underline spelling mistakes as you type proofing options are at hand.

  • Table of Contents & Index
    Create automated Tables of Contents and Indexes for complex documents. PagePlus refers to the named styles you’ve allocated to headings, subheadings and titles to automatically create your Table of Contents, with up to six levels. Indexing documents is simple too, use the intuitive tools to select important terms and let PagePlus do the rest.

Publishing and Sharing

  • PDF Import & Export
    Import individual PDF pages or whole PDF documents as new PagePlus publications. Alternatively, insert a PDF document’s contents into existing publications. Either way, PDF contents can be easily edited within PagePlus—the text and paragraph formatting of the original PDF document is maintained. Export your documents to PDF, with powerful options to publish your PDFs for professional printing (PDF/X) and the web (streaming supported).

  • PDF Forms
    Create your own electronic PDF form, requesting information from form recipients. Your recipients can type in their responses, then save, print or submit their form electronically. Serif will email you completed forms, or you can set up your own web submission service.

  • PDF Slideshows
    Create attention-grabbing PDF slideshows with stylish page and layer transitions—even add sound and video clips! Share with friends, family, and colleagues.

  • ICC Color Profiling
    Set up ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles for your monitor, printer and scanner, and be confident that your printed colors will closely match their appearance on-screen. Avoid wasting time, paper and ink!

  • Printing
    Print documents professionally on your home printer—as several pages on one sheet, or for large format printing, a single page across multiple sheets. For desktop printers without duplex support, use the Manual Duplex printing to create any double-sided publication.

  • Email your publications
    Share
    your PagePlus documents natively or as HTML emails, complete with text, images, and active hyperlinks visible in the body of the email.

  • Publish To Web
    Design your own website directly in PagePlus or publish pages originally created for print to the web as well. PagePlus’s intuitive Web Publishing mode creates all the background HTML code for you and guides you seamlessly through publishing your documents and websites online (either in full or incrementally).

Management

  • Managing resources
    List fonts, resources, and pictures used in your publication in the powerful Resource Manager. Preview, relink, export, and replace individual pictures and other resources. For fonts you can preview, check if embedded, locate fonts on the page, and export them.

  • Package your project
    Gather together your project’s supporting files to allow your project to be used on a different computer or at a print bureau. Resources such as fonts, linked graphics, linked media files, and more, are embedded in a project package—you’ll never suffer from missing resources again!

Key features