I've been using Serif Page Plus for more than ten years. I use it for my personal correspondence, business cards, books, booklets, calendars, PDF files, brochures, CD covers, tickets, and posters. If I have any word-processing task that needs more power than simple text editing (I used Jarte to write this review), or any page layout task, then Page Plus is my first choice.

Page Plus SE is basically PP9, less some key features like PDF Output and a Web Publishing mode. Because it is freeware, it also lacks a few graphic filters like PCX, which require a license fee to be incorporated into any Software package. PNG, JPG, WMF, EMF, BMP, GIF, and TIF, are all supported.

The Free Serif Software Website is beautifully laid out, so for the details I can do little better than point you to Serif's own descriptions of what their software can do.

Why Use PagePlus SE?

DTP vs Word Processing

This software is totally free. You can use it as long as you like without upgrading. To download it, you must register your email address, and Serif will send you promotional emails offering discounted upgrades of Page Plus and other Serif products until you unsubscribe.

Why do they give away such good software for nothing? Because once you have used it, and seen what it can do, you may realise that the price of the upgrade to the full package is fantastic value for money, whether you compare it to MS Publisher, GST Pressworks, or to PageMaker, InDesign, and Quark Express. For years, only Page Plus 5 was available. This out of date package was OK if you took the trouble to learn how to use it, but Page Plus SE is last year's flagship product (almost). I pestered Serif for months¹ to get them to upgrade their free offerings. They finally agreed that it made good marketing sense, and launched the updates last month on Valentine's Day.

For free software, this is about as good as it gets. Only Opera or Irfan View would get my vote for being better designed free products than Page Plus. Open Office is amazing too, but who needs to spend weeks learning how to use it properly, when you can pick up Page Plus and start creative and useful work today?

¹ In fact, I first suggested this on 3/26/2004.

Page Plus SE Patch

I'm not sure if the download has been updated. It probably has been by now. If you find that it crashes when trying to import PNG files, download this DLL update from this post on the Serif forum and put in your PagePlus SE\1.0\Program folder.

Another small difference between Page Plus SE and Page Plus 9 is the lack of support from Drop Capitals (Paragraph Leaders). You can work around this by creating the leader as a separate Artistic text, and wrapping the paragraph text around it.

I wonder how Apple's new Pages fairs in comparision? disregarding the obvious fact that it runs on OS X and not XP.

Difficult to compare the two products at all. Page Plus SE is free and runs on Windows; iWorks is $79 and runs on Macs. We could compare iWorks to the retail version of PP9, which should be available for a lot less if you can find it.

PP10 is a more powerful product with a lot of new features such as Unicode support, footnotes, etc., but is more expensive at $130 for the full product.

iWorks has some features that PP9 doesn't, like charts and movies. PP9 has PDF output, which iWorks seems to lack.

Some users have asked for a port of Page Plus to Linux or the Mac, but I don't see it happening any time soon. The market for foreign language versions would probably be greater.

Bump

I just discovered this product today. Its a great replacement for Publisher.

Can any other programs read its filetype?

I only just read your post after looking at my old reviews.

No. Most DTP programs cannot read other DTP formats, only word-processor formats. To transfer stuff you have to use the Windows Clipboard, or export stories in Rich Text Format and save images to disk.

Serif Page Plus SE is still the same as when I first reviewed it. PP9 is now only £10, PP10 is only £20, and PP11 is only £50. The latest version is PagePlus X2 for about £100. PP11 and PPX2 can open PDF files, which does give you a way of transfering files from other DTP programs, but be warned that the results are rarely perfect, and sometimes pretty much unusable. I found that PDF files from Open Office were about the most useful when opened in PagePlus X2.

See my Review of PPX2 and comparison of features in the different versions.

I've known about Serif's stuff for a while, and back when I used to use it, it was alright.
But I refuse to use it now based purely on the fact that Serif keep phoning me trying to sell stuff almost every week.

I use their stuff because it is good value for money. They never phone me 'cos I wasn't daft enough to give them my phone number. Here in the UK, we have something called the Telephone Preference Service. If you register your number with them you can avoid most sales calls. If you visit your account on the Serif website you can unsubscribe from email newsletters.

I know that lots of people get really uptight about direct sales, and I do too. I just shut the door in the face of any sales person who ignores the NO SALES sign on my door-bell, or just say "No thanks" and put the phone down if I do get a sales call. However, there are ways to avoid the hassle, and if you cannot figure out how to make them stop, then not using their free (or cheap) software won't stop the hassle either.