The most recent articles from Personal Computer World

Review: Adobe Indesign CS3 DTP software

Cliff Joseph — 2007-05-18T00:00:00.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Friday 18 May 2007 at 00:00:00

Adobe's upgraded DTP program challenges Quark Xpress

Adobe’s Indesign is gradually making some progress in challenging Quark Xpress’ stranglehold on the professional DTP market, and this latest version is well equipped to attract even more new users.

Indesign’s layout and typographic tools are certainly impressive, but its greatest strength is probably the fact that it is part of the wider Adobe product range.

The common interface design means that Indesign will feel instantly familiar to users of Photoshop and other Adobe software. You can also use Adobe’s Bridge file browser to quickly insert multiple graphics and other elements into your Indesign layouts.

More importantly, this latest version of Indesign includes a number of graphics tools that come straight out of Illustrator and Photoshop. There’s a powerful new transparency tool, along with effects such as bevel, emboss, and glow. These effects can also be saved as part of a style that can be used in other projects.

The Styles feature has also been extended so that you can apply text and graphic formatting to spreadsheets or tables imported from Excel or Word. There are some nice interface touches as well that can further speed up the design process.

You can customise palette layouts, and the commands shown in the various pull-down menus, and then save these as custom workspaces.

You can even bypass the traditional menu structure altogether using the Quick Apply palette. This is a real timesaver that enables you to type in a word such as ‘shadow’ in order to instantly activate the drop-shadow tool, rather than having to locate the tool in a palette or menu.

Quark Xpress certainly isn’t going to just roll over and die, but Indesign CS3 is a worthy competitor and the ability to buy it as part of a suite that contains Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat will make it particularly tempting for many designers.

Review: Serif Home Creativity Suite

Tim Smith — 2006-03-30T00:00:00.000Z

Tim Smith, Personal Computer World, Thursday 30 March 2006 at 00:00:00

Old versions of Serif's popular DTP applications at a bargain price

Priced at just under £30, Serif's Home Creativity Suite houses two of its flagship products, Pageplus and Photoplus.

With both titles currently selling at a combined price of £160, this appears to be astounding value for money. However, as with previous Home Creativity Suite releases, both titles are old versions.

While Pageplus currently sits at version 11, version 9 (released late 2003) is included in this suite. Similarly, Photoplus 9 (released January 2004) is favoured over the current version 10.

This five CD collection includes the two program discs each with their own resource CD. The final CD is home to Hemera Photo Objects 3000 but, rather bizarrely, the same content is also found on the Photoplus resource CD.

Pageplus 9 appears to have stood the test of time reasonably well. While most of the templates are aimed at the home, professional results are well within reach.

Whether starting from scratch or using one of the many templates, creating documents using Pageplus is no problem at all and the resource CD holds 1,800 templates for you to pick and choose from.

Output is also very flexible. As well as being able to create pdfs, Pageplus is also able to publish direct to the web.

For more information on version 9 of Pageplus, read our original review.

Getting quality images into a document is important, especially if you're looking to publish your work on the Internet, so the inclusion of Photoplus 9 is a good move.

It's similar in many ways to Adobe's Photoshop Elements and features a good selection of tools for touching up photos or creating images from scratch.

As we concluded in our Pageplus 9 review back in 2004, it's a powerful image editor but lacks a wide range of artistic effects and has a relatively poor file browser - especially by today's standards.

Thanks to the metadata included, searching for pictures to use with your documents using Hemera Photo Objects 3000, housed on the final CD, is a simple process.

The included versions of Pageplus and Photoplus might both be over two years old, but if you're not fussed about losing out on the latest features, it's a good value for money package.

System requirements:

Pentium processor

64MB of Ram

Windows 98 or higher

Quark Xpress 6.5 for Windows

John Rennie — 2005-03-15T14:42:55.000Z

John Rennie, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 15 March 2005 at 14:42:55

This is still the market leader, but for how much longer?

It's rare for a software package to completely dominate its market, but for the past decade or so, professional desktop publishing has been entirely synonymous with Quark Xpress.

Go back to 1990 and the nascent DTP market was dominated by a package called Pagemaker, then along came Quark. It proved a revelation to designers and journalists alike with its simple approach and, within a few years, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in publishing with experience of anything but Quark.

But IT and printing have moved on. The increased reliance on producing printer-ready pages in pdf format (Quark doesn't include it) and demands for more sophisticated picture manipulation within the package (Quark couldn't do it) has seen Xpress looking creaky for a few years now.

There were silly anachronisms too: Windows users, accustomed to using multiple undo to correct their typing errors, discovered with horror that Quark would only let you undo your last mistake.

Now the cracks are really beginning to show, and Adobe has been perfecting its own DTP package, Indesign. It is also bundled with Acrobat, and Indesign works well with Photoshop. And then there's the price tag - under £700 compared to Quark's £1,000-plus. Little surprise that the trickle of newspapers and magazines moving to the Adobe software has recently become a flood.

Not a great position for Quark then, as it sees a new generation of designers emerging trained in rival software. So at this Alamo in its product history, can Quark do enough with 6.5 to hold its patch of ground?

This new version builds on new features introduced in version 6 - the use of layers, synchronised text and multiple undo. But it's more than a tweak. Several features slated for version 7 have been pulled forward and the package goes out free to users of 6 and for £163 for users of 3 and later.

Quark uses Xtensions to augment the basic package, and the most impressive here is Vista, which lets you tweak, enhance and apply effects to the pictures on your page instead of having to go out to Photoshop. This is a long-overdue attempt to build a comprehensive DTP image-manipulation suite.

Click into the Picture Effects palette and you can apply emboss, diffuse, despeckle, unsharp mark - everything designers are likely to need to enhance pictures for print. The PSD Import Xtension, meanwhile, allows you to import Photoshop images, maintaining the layers used by Photoshop though annoyingly not allowing you to manipulate them.

The Xclusive Xtension lets you create print layouts direct from Xpress for output to HP Indigo digital presses. With the Print Styles now allowing you to specify bleed settings and enhanced support for pdf creation via more effective picture compression, Quark has partly addressed its isolation from the print medium.

You can even click in the Missing Fonts window to quickly go online and buy font sets missing from your system (useful when somebody sends you documents created with arcane typefaces). But it doesn't incorporate Adobe Writer, and all the print options in the world don't make up for that.

A success? It has to be a qualified yes, with Quark addressing the two big failings in the existing Xpress over the courses of versions 6 and 6.5. For its work on pictures we'd give it an A+, for the print features a B. As such this could see many Quark diehards keeping the faith, especially as the upgrade is free.

The sad irony (apart from the fact that Adobe now owns Pagemaker and might see Indesign as revenge) is that if Quark had come up with these leaps forward three or four years ago, it would still be dominating the market. As it is, this could be an impressive last hurrah.

But we really have to ask. Has Quark given up on new users? Indesign costs around £675, which isn't cheap but a snip compared to the £1,095 Quark is asking. So the chances of new users electing for Quark, let alone anyone swapping back from Adobe's package, are roughly on a par with Betamax making a comeback next Christmas.

Prices:

£1,095 (£931.91 ex VAT); Passport £1,365 (£1,161.70 ex VAT)

Contact:

Quark 00800 1787 8275

www.quark.co.uk

System requirements:

Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP
128MB of Ram
190MB available hard disk space
CD-Rom drive
TCP/IP network for site licence (using Quark License Administrator)

Serif Pageplus 10

Laura Jones — 2005-02-09T11:09:55.000Z

Laura Jones, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 9 February 2005 at 11:09:55

Value for money page-layout software with some useful new features

Serif Pageplus 10 brings page layout software into the hands of non-professional users, providing simplified tools to create a whole range of publications from business cards to books. It's been around for 14 years, so Serif must be doing something right.

The new features in version 10 will be welcomed by those who need to create long documents, or who need to import information from other data sources into a publication.

The Bookplus utility allows you to link multiple Pageplus publications into a book, treating each one as a different chapter. You can re-order, add and delete chapters and page numbers will be automatically updated, you can also apply styles across chapters and create a contents page and index for your book.

Meanwhile, the Mail and Photo Merge tools let you merge photos or text from a range of data sources including SQL Server, Access and Excel, plus contact details from Outlook, into your publications. This feature is useful if you want to create a brochure or catalogue from a folder of images, and using repeating areas photos can be flowed directly into your layout.

The interface is clear and uncluttered, and Serif has made it easier to get at tools such as the Spell Checker, which now floats on screen as you work. The tab-based tool bar gives you an instant picture of how changes to elements such as colour schemes and fonts will look.

The program comes laden with templates, wizards and guides, which are useful as it's not easy to use without experience of DTP software. But the ready-made publications can be cheesy.

Price:

£99.99 (upgrade from any Serif product £49.99)

Contact:

Serif 0800 376 7070

www.serif.com

System requirements:

Windows 98 or higher
Pentium PC
64MB of Ram
240MB of hard disk space
800 x 600 colour monitor

Scansoft PDF Converter

Andy Gibbons — 2004-09-28T10:08:29.000Z

Andy Gibbons, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 28 September 2004 at 10:08:29

Create and edit pdf files in a jiffy.

PDF Converter Professional 2 from Scansoft addresses the two most common tasks faced by those working with Adobe's portable document format (pdf) files - creating pdfs from scratch and extracting content from existing files.

Installation provides two quite separate applications and activation is required before either becomes functional. The first, PDF Create 2, allows you to output pdf files in any print-capable Windows application. Or you can drag and drop files into PDF Create 2's own application window. The latter allows more than one file to be processed at a time and multiple document types can be merged into a single pdf.

PDF Converter 2 is essentially a plug-in for Microsoft Word and has been blessed with a number of new features since we looked at its predecessor in January. Notable among these are an easier to use front end and improved form handling.

The obvious test for such a package is to convert a Word document into a pdf and back again. We did just this with a reasonably complex form and the resultant pdf was perfect. The conversion back to Word format was almost as impressive with just a few minor bullet point and box anomalies that were easy to correct.

In other tests it fared well, with multi-column and picture-heavy documents. For general office document and form use, both elements of the package impressed us greatly with their ease of use and accuracy.

Contact: Scansoft 0870 870 8085

www.scansoft.co.uk

System requirements:

Windows 98 SE or greater
Pentium-class processor
64MB of Ram
80MB hard disk space
Microsoft Word 97 or greater

Serif Home Creativity Suite

Cliff Joseph — 2004-08-20T10:30:33.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Friday 20 August 2004 at 10:30:33

A wide range of graphics and DTP tools for less than £50.

Depending on your point of view, Serif's Home Creativity Suite is either a tired marketing ploy or a bit of a bargain. The company is well-known for products such as Pageplus, Photoplus and Drawplus, which provide easy-to-use graphics and DTP tools at a competitive price. A bundle that contains all three products for a mere £49.99 would therefore seem to be a real bargain. It's worth noting, though, that these aren't the latest versions of the products.

The Home Creativity Suite is quite a bit behind the times, as it includes the old Pageplus 8, Photoplus 7 and Drawplus 5. In other words, most of these programs are two major upgrades or nearly two years, behind the current versions.

Each program is provided on a separate disc, each with its own installer, rather than having a single integrated installer program for the entire suite and two of the three programs insist you enter your company name before you can install them. This is just plain sloppy in a product that's supposed to be aimed at home users.

Initial impressions aren't that good, then. But the Home Creativity Suite still manages to provide decent value for money. Its three component programs may not be bang up to date but they're still pretty good and, most importantly, easy to use.

Photoplus 7 obviously isn't as powerful as some of the newer photo-editing programs now available, but it's a decent entry-level editor and has some fun special effects you can play with. There are several tools such as 'twirl' and 'ripple' that you can use to distort images, and some powerful filters, including a lighting filter that allows you to add multiple light sources that can drastically alter the mood and look of a photo.

It's also got some useful animation features for creating graphics for web pages. But it does need a 'revert' tool that will allow you to instantly discard all changes you've made to an image and its File Browser has an annoying habit of staying on screen and obscuring any images you try to open, but these are only minor irritants. What it really lacks, though, are tightly focused options such as the 'recipes' in Photoshop Elements to guide you through specific tasks such as removing red-eye or adjusting image sizes.

Pageplus 8 is a good DTP program for first-time users. It has a wizard that allows you to automatically create a variety of documents such as newsletters, business cards and web pages. A 'Studio' pane on the right-hand side of the workspace then allows you to quickly modify options such as the colour scheme, or to add layout elements such as 'pull-out quotes' and text effects for logos. The program also has some good text tools, with simple options for creating drop capitals and handling vertical text. There's an option for creating text style sheets to ensure consistent appearance of text throughout your documents, although this can be clumsy at times and spreads options across too many dialogue boxes. Pageplus is a good program for creating documents that are just a few pages long, but we wouldn't recommend it for projects any longer than that.

Finally, there's Drawplus, the vector graphics and illustration part of the suite. This provides a good selection of tools for beginners, such as ready-made symbols for creating circuit diagrams, floorplans or computer network diagrams. It also has some more advanced functions, such as a powerful blending tool that can blend one shape into another.

But none of these programs are particularly outstanding, and there's a definite feeling that you're dealing with software that is well past its sell-by date. Even so, at just £49.99 the Home Creativity Suite is still good value for money and will appeal to complete beginners or people who are on a really tight budget.

Contact: Serif 0800 376 7070

www.serif.com

System requirements:

Pentium PC with Windows 98 SE or later
64MB of Ram

Data Becker PDF Producer

Andy Gibbons — 2004-06-08T11:54:31.000Z

Andy Gibbons, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 8 June 2004 at 11:54:31

A basic and effective pdf creation tool.

The portable document format (pdf) is the only serious contender when it comes to distributing documents electronically, thanks largely to cross-platform support and widely available free viewing software.

PDF Producer from Germany's Data Becker is a low-cost pdf creation tool, which aims to provide a cut-down alternative for those who don't need the features or cost associated with Adobe's Acrobat.

Installing as an additional printer driver, pdf creation is available from any print-capable Windows application and is as simple as selecting PDF Producer instead of the usual physical printer. Clicking on the Properties button opens a dialogue box where a number of options are available, including optimisation for web or print use and password protection.

From here, it's on to the Preview window where a final visual check can be made before the pdf is rendered. Pages can still be deleted or restored at this stage. The preview sometimes struggled to represent some of our documents, but despite this glitch, the resulting pdfs usually emerged unaffected.

Working with some Microsoft Publisher documents, we encountered occasional text spacing and rule anomalies, but for general office and personal use, this shouldn't pose too many problems.

It won't threaten Acrobat's dominance, but should prove a capable enough performer for less demanding requirements.

Contact: Phoenix Global 0870 240 4494

www.databecker.com

System Requirements:

300MHz processor
128MB of Ram
10MB of free hard disk space
SVGA monitor
Windows 2000/XP

Coreldraw 12 Graphics Suite

Cliff Joseph — 2004-05-14T10:04:48.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Friday 14 May 2004 at 10:04:48

A strong upgrade for this collection of veteran applications.

This is one of those upgrades that will either grab you straight away or leave you wondering what all the fuss is about.

Like its predecessors, the Coreldraw Graphics Suite is a collection of graphics software that contains three main applications. There's the veteran Coreldraw for vector graphics work, Photo-Paint for photo-editing and the often overlooked Rave, which is a good program for creating web animations.

All three programs have been upgraded in the latest version of the Graphics Suite, yet the list of new features is surprisingly brief. That's because the main new feature - the Smart Drawing tool - is designed to introduce a new way of working, rather than padding out a list of features.

It is similar to the freehand brush or pen provided by many vector graphics programs, but instead of simply recording your brush strokes on screen, the Smart Drawing tool has a degree of intelligence built in. This enables it to recognise the shapes you're drawing and automatically convert them into smooth curves and straight lines in order to create a more polished appearance.

You could use the program's existing freehand tools, of course, but creating freehand drawings on a computer screen is always tricky. Drawing accurately with a mouse is very difficult and even with a good graphics tablet it only takes a slight shake of the hand to cause a glaring error.

Using the new Smart Drawing tool helps to eliminate these errors and enables even amateur artists to create smoothly finished vector artwork.

There's also an option to adjust the smoothing level, so you can turn the smoothing right down to give your artwork a rough, hand-drawn appearance.

The Smart Drawing tool works pretty well, although you'll probably get better results from it if you're using a graphics tablet. Your appreciation of this tool will also depend on whether or not you tend to create a lot of hand-drawn artwork.

Business users who just use Coreldraw for creating simple business graphics may never feel the need to explore this tool, but more adventurous designers who like to create their own artwork will probably use it a lot.

This isn't the only new feature, though. To assist in creating more technical drawings, Coreldraw 12 boasts improved snapping controls and new 'dynamic guides' that can be customised to work the way you want. You can tell the cursor to snap to specific points on nearby objects, or create guidelines that run at specific angles relative to any line or curve you select.

There's also an impressive new Eyedropper tool. As well as sampling the colours you click on, the Eyedropper can now copy object attributes, such as stroke and fill, or even the degree of rotation applied to a particular object. It's a really clever idea, and could be a major time saver when creating complex illustrations.

All these new features are also found in Rave, the animation program which is probably the least well-known of all Corel's products. These new tools make it easier to create your own graphics within Rave, but the program's strength remains its ease of use and the ability to export Flash animations. This makes it a great alternative to Flash, which is too complicated and expensive for anyone who isn't a professional web developer.

That leaves Photo-Paint, which unfortunately draws the short straw in this upgrade. Its only major new feature is the Touch-up brush. This works well enough, allowing you to quickly remove scratches and other blemishes from photographs, but by itself it makes for a pretty disappointing upgrade.

The other disappointing detail is the cost of upgrading from the previous version of the Graphics Suite. Corel has translated the US upgrade price from $179 to £179 ex VAT. But, to be fair, the full price of the complete Graphics Suite is still less than a single copy of Adobe Photoshop, so it's a good choice for any business user or technical illustrator looking for a good all-round collection of graphics tools.

Contact: Corel 01628 589 800

www.corel.co.uk

System requirements:

Pentium II
256MB of Ram
256MB of hard disk space
Windows 2000 or XP

Price details:

RRP: Full version: £421.82 (£359 ex VAT); Upgrade: £210.32 (£179 ex VAT)

Adobe Pagemaker Plug-in

Ken McMahon — 2004-04-29T15:38:31.000Z

Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World, Thursday 29 April 2004 at 15:38:31

An Indesign tool to help smooth transition.

The application that launched the DTP revolution is being put out to grass. Adobe will continue to sell Pagemaker 7, but there won't be any new numbers or a Mac OSX version. This is a serious issue for Mac users, who will have to make the switch or persevere with an application that will run only in Classic mode.

Adobe hopes that Pagemaker users will now migrate to Indesign CS and has released this Pagemaker plug-in pack for the newer program. In addition to a converter, which allows you to open Pagemaker 6 documents in Indesign (version 6.5 and 7 documents will open without the plug-ins), the pack includes some of Pagemaker's high-end features.

There's the splash screen, providing access to document filing and a template library. The Office-style Pagemaker toolbar with familiar printing, filing, text formatting and view options is present, the position tool works like Pagemaker's crop tool and another plug-in adds all the keyboard shortcuts.

It works very well, and anyone making the move to Indesign will have a smoother ride as a result. Indesign already shares some features with Pagemaker and, for users who are hooked into features such as data merge or the build booklet command, the case for upgrading to a professional package with the additional functionality of Indesign is strong.

But there's a proportion of Pagemaker users whose requirements are more modest. For these the upgrade price to Indesign may be too steep.

Contact: Adobe 020 8606 4001

www.adobe.co.uk

System requirements:

Pentium II
Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2 or Windows XP
128MB of Ram
Indesign 312MB, plug-in pack 258MB of disk space

Price Details;

RRP: Plug-in £47.19 (£39 ex VAT)

Indesign CS Pagemaker Edition upgrade £339.58 inc VAT

Serif Pageplus 9

Tim Nott — 2004-04-08T09:34:19.000Z

Tim Nott, Personal Computer World, Thursday 8 April 2004 at 09:34:19

Excellent layout and artistic features make this a good alternative to Publisher.

Twelve years ago, Serif Pageplus was one of the first budget Windows desktop publishing applications, competing with Timeworks (now GSP) and Microsoft Publisher. Whereas the last of these concentrated on hand-holding the beginner, Serif aimed higher, with professional features such as colour separations, Pantone libraries and manual kerning of letter pairs.

Since then, Serif has continued to add features: the early versions were only suitable for short publications as you couldn't flow text between frames, but this was soon rectified, as was the lack of indexing, table-of-contents and other long-document essentials. Later versions added accuracy of placement to one-tenth of a point or degree; separate story and table editors; drawing tools; transparency effects; in-house photo-enhancement and more.

So, what's new this time? As usual there's a lot in the package. Our review copy came on two CDs, with over 300 fonts, 260 fills and textures, 600 animated gifs for web publishing and 600 wizards. There's less clip-art than in previous versions, but given that this was a triumph of quantity over quality perhaps that's not such a bad thing. As well as a 150-page paper 'companion' there's an excellent set of tutorials, covering everything from the basics of placing frames and images; wrapping text to graphics; effects like dropped shadows and specialised tasks such as mail-merging or creating numbered tickets.

There's been a general smartening-up of the interface, with sleeker buttons and some new features. To the right of the screen is the Studio, which has tabbed buttons to access everything from an individual object's attributes to colour schemes, clip-art and ready-made coupons or logos. To the left are the tools for creating items such as frames, free-range text and drawing objects, as well as those for applying special effects such as transparency. At the top are standard-looking formatting and zooming controls. Finally, the free-floating Change Bar, which has been with Pageplus since early days, lets you adjust the size, position and other attributes of text and objects with numerical precision.

There have been several enhancements in the drawing and text-tweaking tools. You now have several ways of fitting a line of text to a curved path, and you can apply instant 3D effects to text, complete with lighting, extrusion and shadows. A Mesh Warp tool lets you stretch any object - text included - in various directions by manipulating its 'envelope'. Just as with mainstream drawing applications, you can convert both text and shape objects to curves, for low-level editing. You can also make a frame (text container) out of any shape, including letters you have converted to shapes, which can make for some interesting experimental effects but probably won't enhance the legibility of your work.

The big news in this version is that you can create Adobe Acrobat (pdf) files directly from Pageplus, complete with Pagehints (pop-up annotations), bookmarks and hyperlinks, so you can have 'live' tables of contents and cross-references. This version also supports ICC profiles, so images imported from a profiled scanner can be printed as accurately as possible on a profiled printer.

In general, the quality of the resources has improved. The numerous wizards and colour schemes, while not quite up to the level of Microsoft Publisher in terms of elegance, are a lot better than they have been.

The weak point is the selection of fonts. Many of these should come with a 'Display only - do not set more than five words at once' health warning, but it's not just the display and 'fun' typefaces that are hard on the eye. The essential point of DTP software is that it should set body type in a legible and harmonious manner. Many of the typefaces supplied for body text - even those used in the wizards - show poor spacing in print and a lack of 'hinting' makes them look very ragged on screen. This is a shame as it lets down the otherwise excellent page-layout and artistic features of Pageplus 9.

Contact: Serif 0115 914 2000

www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplus9

System requirements:

Windows 98 or above
Pentium processor
64MB of Ram
170MB of disk space
800 x 600 display

Adobe Creative Suite

Ken McMahon — 2004-02-16T12:08:53.000Z

Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World, Monday 16 February 2004 at 12:08:53

Productivity and feature enhancements make this upgrade a must for designers.

In a typically bold move, Adobe has abandoned version numbers and combined its four design products - Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Golive, plus the Acrobat 6 pdf authoring application - into a suite of applications entitled Adobe Creative Suite. Each of the new applications (with the exception of Acrobat) carries the CS suffix and, although you can still buy them individually, it wouldn't make much financial sense.

Adobe upgrades have always been as much about redefining workflows and improving productivity as well as rolling out new features, and Creative Suite is not merely an exercise designed to save on packaging. As well as extending integration between the four applications, Adobe has added a fifth - Version Cue.

Version Cue is a networkable file management and administration system designed for those with no experience of file management. Particularly in small to medium-sized production departments, file management and versioning is a logistical nightmare often with ad hoc arrangements for location and version naming of files. Version Cue provides a solution without imposing an onerous administration burden.

Version Cue is installed on a host machine and is available to all users within a workgroup. Its projects don't exist as volumes on the desktop, but are accessed from within the save and open dialogue boxes of CS applications. As the name suggests, Version Cue's primary task is to transparently save CS documents as successive versions, rather than overwriting the existing one.

Each version is date and user stamped and, if desired, annotated. In an emergency any prior version can be reinstated. This obviously has to be managed if terminal disk bloat is to be avoided, but Version Cue makes this a simple deletion task.

Documents are locked to other users in the workgroup while they are being edited and also if they have been saved outside of Version Cue, for example, to work on them at home.

Version Cue lacks the sophistication of more capable file management systems which, in our view, makes it perfect for the task - a utility that will become indispensable for everyone from the lone freelancer up.

Indesign CS

As with other applications in the suite, Adobe has concentrated on workspace and productivity improvements, rather than adding major features to Indesign CS. A context-sensitive control palette - a superior version of the Quark measurements palette - takes over the functions of the character, paragraph, transform, stroke and table palettes.

With the type tool selected, the control palette can be toggled between character and paragraph views. Select an image and it displays the transform palette data and the stroke type and weight menus, together with dedicated buttons for content fitting - fit content to frame and so on.

The new info palette, similar to that of Photoshop's and Illustrator's, provides all you need to know about an object and the means to edit it. It's remarkable how much information Adobe has succeeded in presenting while avoiding clutter and overload. With an image selected, the info palette reports the file type, colour space, profile and resolution at the original and scaled size. With the type tool selected, character, word, line and paragraph counts are also provided.

Like most of the other palettes, the info palette can be docked in a collapsible side tab, or free-floated on screen alone, or in combination with other palettes, as before.

A layout-independent story editor that provides a word processor-style view of the text and permits copy and style editing has long been a feature of Pagemaker, and Adobe has at last added this capability to Indesign.

The already excellent Pre-press features have been enhanced by the addition of a new separations preview palette which provides previews of individual and progressive CMYK and spot colour plates. Another new palette, the Flattener preview palette, shows how transparent effects will output when rasterised at various resolutions.

Other improvements include new pdf authoring and export tools, support for Photoshop spot colour channels, improved master page handling, pathfinder commands, bleeds and slugs and a new package for Golive command which prepares layouts for web authoring.

Photoshop CS

A new Photoshop release is always keenly anticipated, and this one is no exception. Last time around it was the healing tool that caused the excitement, this time the big new feature is the shadow/highlight command. The nearest thing we've seen to this is Photoshop Elements' Adjust Backlighting command, but shadow/highlights provides much more control.

Essentially, it improves badly exposed images such as those shot with strong backlighting and no fill-in flash, where the subject is in deep shadow. It works by comparing pixel values with neighbouring pixels over a given radius and thus confining changes only to the shadow or highlight areas.

The defaults are set to rectify the backlight problem described but, by using the amount, radius, tonal width, colour correction and midtone contrast sliders, a variety of exposure problems can be addressed.

The new Match colour command matches colours between multiple images, layers or selections. This might be used, for example, to remove inconsistencies in studio shots taken with different lighting conditions. The dialogue box requires you to specify a source and target document, but there are also sliders for luminance, colour intensity and fade.

The layers palette has been revised and it's now possible to nest layer sets up to five layers deep. Another feature that will make layer management of complex images, such as web pages, much simpler is Layer Comps. These allow you to record the state of layer visibility, position, blending options and effects for future recall.

The new Filter Gallery allows you to experiment with and apply multiple filters simultaneously from within a single dialogue box. This can be resized to fill the screen with a big preview window. As well as applying multiple filters, you can easily change the stacking order, but only the artistic, brush strokes, distort, sketch and stylise filters are included.

The browser is much faster and now has its own toggle button on the toolbar. You can perform batch processing from the browser, add flags, keywords and even edit metadata, saving this header information without resaving and recompressing jpeg image data.

This version of Photoshop has just one new tool - the colour replacement tool. Other new features and enhancements include fully integrated support for 16bit colour, text on a path, live histograms, lens blur effects, non-square pixel support, photo filters and the Camera Raw plug-in and Photoshop Elements' Photomerge panoramic stitching tool.

Illustrator CS

The most noticeable thing about Illustrator CS is its speed. Top of the new features list is the 3D tools which allow you to extrude, revolve and rotate 2D shapes to create and manipulate the third dimension.

The dialogue box for the revolve and extrude commands includes controls for three-axis rotation, perspective and shading and lighting controls. You can set the extrusion depth and add a bevel, and the revolve dialogue will provide an angle setting so you can stop the revolve at any point, for example to produce a quarter-turned 3D object. You can also apply an offset so the object rotates about a point other than its centre - useful for creating cylinders and other hollow objects.

While these new 3D tools don't provide anything like the functionality of 3D applications such as Lightwave or Maya, they are, nonetheless, a useful addition to Illustrator's toolbox.

Adobe has had a blitz on Illustrator's typographic features, bringing it in line with Indesign. The first thing you'll notice is that fonts are now displayed in Wysiwyg form in the font menu and their type - Opentype, Truetype or Postscript - is identified by an icon.

Typographic enhancements include character and paragraph styles, improved support for Opentype features, including a glyph palette, optical kerning and margin alignment, tab leaders, hyphenation and justification, and easier linking of text boxes. In fact, Illustrator now has just about all the typographic features of Indesign, including the every-line composer that examines blocks of text to determine the best line breaks.

'Type on a path' options have been expanded with a new Path type submenu with five alignment options. You can also control character alignment from the 'Path type options' dialogue box.

A new 'Save for Microsoft Office' option optimises files for Word, Powerpoint or Excel, while improved output options and a generous package of templates, brushes, swatches, symbol libraries and fonts will all help to broaden Illustrator's appeal beyond the professional design market.

Golive CS

With this release of Golive Adobe is clearly out to tempt web designers away from Dreamweaver by providing tighter integration with applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. For those who need to repurpose print content for the web, Indesign's Package for Golive command prepares XML content for drag-and-drop import to Golive via a viewer application, a more workable arrangement than HTML export filters.

A new code completion engine offers a selection of syntactically correct code elements based on what you're currently typing. This includes support for CSS, Javascript, PHP, SMIL, SVG and XML, and is as much a learning tool as a convenience for more experienced coders.

Contact: Adobe 020 8606 4001

www.adobe.com

Price Details:

RRP Standard Edition £927.08 (£789 ex VAT)

Premium Edition £1115.08 (£949 ex VAT)

Photoshop upgrade £663.88 (£565 ex VAT)

System Requirements:

Pentium III
Windows 2000 or XP
192MB Ram (128MB Ram for Version Cue)
1.55GB hard disk space
1,024 x 768 16bit video

Scansoft PDF Converter

Clive Akass — 2004-01-23T16:26:21.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Friday 23 January 2004 at 16:26:21

Open Acrobat files as editable documents.

Scansoft's PDF Converter addresses the problem of extracting editable text from portable document format (pdf) files. This is a tricky operation even using the full version of Adobe's Acrobat software for which the format was designed.

In fact pdf files were intended less for data exchange than as a presentation tool allowing a richly formatted document to be viewed on a variety of platforms - in some applications text extraction is disabled to preserve copyright.

But as the use of pdf documents increases, so does the need to process the information they hold. The latest free Acrobat 6 reader is much improved in this respect, so any paid-for rival must be judged by its standards.

PDF Converter scores in that it translates documents directly into Word format, matching typefaces to the closest available on the host PC. It is basically a Word plug-in: you open a pdf as if it were a native format and a Scansoft status box appears while the document is translated. Or if you right-click a pdf file from within Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer you get the option of opening it in Word. This is an improvement over Acrobat Reader 6, which allows you to extract text but not the full formatted document. But neither utility does a good job with very complex multi-boxed, multi-column layouts, although PDF Converter coped with the pictures, captions and text of a brochure.

Contact: Scansoft 0870 870 8085

www.scansoft.co.uk

System requirements:

Pentium PC
64MB of Ram (128MB recommended)
30MB of free hard disk space
SVGA monitor
Windows 98SE/2000/ME/XP/NT4/SP6 or higher

Corel Print House 6

Cliff Joseph — 2003-10-29T13:56:57.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 29 October 2003 at 13:56:57

Make your own party invites and more.

Designed to help make the most of birthdays, weddings and celebrations, Corel's Print House has become something of a family favourite. With version 6, the package offers even more features, but has also started to evolve into other areas.

Things start off with simple printing projects, such as greetings cards and calendars. You don't need much in the way of artistic skill and the program includes a huge library of templates to help you get started.

When you're feeling adventurous you can then experiment with some of its additional features. There's a set of basic drawing tools, some attractive text fonts and even a selection of special filters and artistic effects.

Print House also includes Custom Photo, a photo-editing program that can help you prepare photos for your projects. It's pretty basic, but it's easy to use and has a reasonable selection of tools and special effects.

This is all standard stuff and will be useful if you or your kids like mucking about with your inkjet printer. Delve a little deeper into the program, though, and it starts to head off into Blue Peter land.

You'll need to dig out the scissors and glue for some of the more eccentric projects. These include doorknob hangers and handbags. There's also a big selection of templates for creating paper puppets and 3D figures.

It's all a bit much if you're just looking for something to help you print some invitations. On the other hand, it might be just the thing to keep the kids busy.

Contact: Corel 01628 589 894

www.corel.co.uk

System Requirements:

Windows 2000 or XP
200MHz processor or higher
64MB of Ram