PagePlus was a

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online co ...

(page layout) program developed by

Serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

for Microsoft Windows. The first version was released in 1991 as the first commercial sub-£100 DTP package for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. The final release was PagePlus X9, which was released in November 2016. In June 2019 it was officially replaced by Serif with Affinity Publisher.

History

PagePlus was first launched in 1990 and was the first sub-£100 desktop publishing program for Windows 3.0. Three years later, in spring 1993, PagePlus 2 was released and provided full colour printing support. Following this release, a new version of the product was released on a roughly annual basis. Serif did a complete rewrite of the original program source code for the release of PagePlus version 8. Despite the rewrite, at that time the program name was retained and the version number was simply incremented. Version 8 was able to read data files created in previous versions 1 to 7.

Replacement by Affinity Publisher

Serif announced that PagePlus X9 was to be the final PagePlus release. The last build issued to date is v19.0.2.22 from 28 April 2017. Serif ceased further development of all "Plus" products to focus efforts on their 'Affinity' product line. Serif began rewriting their DTP software, to allow a multi-platform implementation, and allow new methods of internal program operation with more modern operating systems and the typical current (2018/9) configuration of PCs. A public beta of Serif's Affinity Publisher (the closest of the Affinity applications to PagePlus functionality) was launched in August 2018, followed by the first full version of the application in June 2019.

Overview

While PagePlus was generally targeted at the "entry level" DTP user, some of the functionality present in the market leading applications (Quark's

XPress ''XPRESS'' was a weekly tabloid newspaper. It was launched in the UAE on 15 March 2007. The magazine was published in Dubai by the Al Nisr Group as a sister paper to ''Gulf News.'' It was shut down in 2018 due to declining revenue. History Work ...

and

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

's InDesign) is present in PagePlus, such as working in the

CMYK The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation ''CMYK'' refers ...

colour space,

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

Feature support, and Optical margin alignment (Optical Justification). PagePlus also has the ability to view, create, edit and publish

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

files, and publish E-books in *.epub or *mobi formats suitable for the Kindle store. It also includes support for EPUB3 fixed layout eBooks for textbooks, children's books etc. PagePlus is primarily written in C++ using

Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

, with a heavy dependence on the MFC framework. The Windows

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library was discarded early in development in favour of an in-house composition engine supporting advanced bitmap and typeface operations. The text engine supports

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

text entry.

Supported platforms

PagePlus was first developed for 16-bit

v3.0 running on PC/MS DOS but the final releases support

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

(32/64bit),

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

(32/64bit),

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

(32/64bit) and

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

(32/64bit).

Version history

* PagePlus: 1990 * PagePlus 2: 1993 * PagePlus 3: 1994 * PagePlus 4: 1996 * PagePlus 5: 1997 (revised for XP compatibility and reissued in 2002) * PagePlus 6: 1999 * PagePlus 7: 1 October 2000 * PagePlus 8: 2001 * PagePlus 8: PDF Edition, 9 September 2002 * PagePlus 9: September 2003 * PagePlus 10: 11 October 2004 * PagePlus 11: 3 October 2005 * PagePlus X2: 19 February 2007 * PagePlus X3: 21 April 2008 * PagePlus X4: 11 September 2009 * PagePlus X5: 18 October 2010 * PagePlus X6: 5 December 2011 * PagePlus X7: 3 June 2013 * PagePlus X8: 4 August 2014 * PagePlus X9: 16 November 2015

References

Bibliography

PagePlus official user guide

External links

* * The CommunityPlus Forums were closed on 5 July 2022
Alfred's Serif Users' Forums
is a fan-based forum for users of the legacy Serif products

Reviews

Affordable Desktop Publishing From Serif – PC Mag

Review of PagePlus X5 – PC PRO
{{authority control 1990 software C++ software Desktop publishing software Windows-only proprietary software Products and services discontinued in 2019 Discontinued software