Serif's flagship program, PagePlus, has entered its teens with version X3 but the company is still building in major new features.

As background, PagePlus X2 could already create and edit all kinds of print and electronic documents - including PDF files - as well as handle tables and forms, edit photos and deal with long-document functions like indexes and tables of contents. Live calendars and multi-page templates showed Serif was moving to cover a wider range of document types and X3 continues this trend.

The two major enhancements are Image Cutout and Logo Studio. The Image Cutout Studio is a separate window that enables you run brushes over the areas of an image you want to keep and those you want to discard, and helpfully tints them in green and red as you work. It has several different brush sizes, but it would be good to have the option to draw marquees point-to-point as well as marking by painting.

A long while ago Serif used to have a little applet called LogoPlus, which could be used to knock up a neat 2D logo to help promote a product or organisation. The Logo Studio here is like a super-superset of this. As well as providing a good gallery of modern, designer shapes, it enables a wide range of effects, so you can change the materials of objects and logo text, repositioning and resizing any of them as you go.

If you then click on Instant 3D, you can pull these logo elements into the third dimension, complete with real-time lighting. All this happens within PagePlus, so you can tweak the results at any time during design.

What problems there are, are in core things like text rendering. While it's difficult for a DTP program, required to show many different fonts at multiple magnifications, to always get things right on a low-resolution screen, undue gaps between words in text frames often look as if lines are justified when they aren't.

It also hard to drag out a frame wider or longer than your current view of the page, because the page doesn't scroll, as is usual in DTP and graphics programs. Serif has said it'll look at this for X4.

Until then, other improvements in X3 include a manual duplexing Wizard, feathering control for vignetting images and the ability to package all the elements in a document - text files, graphics, photos, even the fonts used - in a single package for taking to a commercial printer.

PagePlus X3 is £20 cheaper than X2 was, coming in at a very reasonable £80. You can do a huge amount with PagePlus quickly and easily and Serif appears to have added the extra functionality while still keeping the interface logical and not over-cluttered. Our few niggles aside, this publishing application continues to be tremendous value.