VERDICT: A questionable interface redesign, greater-than-ever complexity and a general half-baked feeling.

Acrobat’s great strength is its multi-purpose flexibility but this leads to its great weakness – complexity. With Acrobat 8 Professional, Adobe finally attempts to tackle the problem...

VERDICT: New multiple page support and improved text handling and workflow integration but the program’s main strength remains its underlying speed.

Xara has always stood out for the astonishing speed of its vector handling and for the hands-on creativity that this enables...

Tom Arah looks at the history, problems, solutions and future of designing for the screen.

Previously I looked at the history of desktop publishing (DTP) with its focus on print-based design and output to paper. However the advent of the Apple Mac and of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) into the mainstream of personal computing also heralded the opening up of an entirely new publishing medium and one that is set to become even more important than paper – the computer screen itself.