Scansoft PaperPort Pro 9 Office reviewed

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Manufacturer: Scansoft
Price: Depends
Requirements: Windows, Pentium or above, 32MB, 64MB or greater, depending on the flavour, 80MB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, SVGA monitor
Web Site: WWW.SCANSOFT.COM

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WE'VE USED SCANSOFT scanning software before and been pretty pleased with its performance, so when we received a copy of PaperPort Pro version 9.0, we were looking forward to seeing what it could do.

The software is ambitious in its scope. Not only does Scansoft claim that it can organise and share PDFs, paper and other digital documents in an organisation, it also supports network scanning and that's all within a single shell which as you can see from this shot below, attempts to integrate many of your applications - including Microsoft Office - into a single shell.

Mr Chubbs and two other documents in this screenshot are samples supplied by Scansoft. PC Independent News is a newsletter from way back when that we've scanned in to see how the basic engine works.

Of course, a lot depends on what scanner you're using. For the purposes of this review we've used an HP Scanjet 5400C which, we must say, we're not entirely happy with since we bought it earlier this year. However, it's well capable - when it works - of scanning in well printed docs and so that's what we've tested here.

Once you've scanned in your document, you can select which portion of it you want the OCR (optical character recognition) engine to work on, and which application you want it to use for that process.

Depending on the applications you've got installed, you can, for example send it to Word, to Excel, to Acrobat, to Wordpad or to other software.

For the purposes of this review, we sent it to Wordpad, and this is how it did.

The first paragraph of the top story - MS and Sybase ride again, reads:

Copy typed version
"Microsoft and Sybase showed every sign of being friendly again last week when version 4.2 of SQL Server was announced.

"Sybase - in which Microsoft has an estimated 15% stake - originally provided the technology component of the network database server when the product was first launched in 1988.

"Ashton-Tate brought the product to market, but failed to give it the original expected impetus".

And compare that with PaperPort 9.0's attempt using OCR:

OCR version
Microsoft and Sybase showed every sign of being friendly again last week when version 4.2 of SQL Server was announced,

Sybase — in which Microsoft has an estimated 15% stake — originally provided the technology component of the network database server when the product was first launched in 1988.

Ashton-Tate brought the product to market, hut failed to give it the original expected impetus.

We think that's pretty good - the only mistake the OCR made was in the first paragraph, where a full stop was replaced with a comma. The rest of this front page was pretty well word perfect too. The software distinguishes between the different columns and sizes of text and attempts to mimic it, obviously depending on the fonts available on a system.

The OCR engine also retains the formatting and the justification in the original document.

What else can this product do? As well as reading and writing Adobe Acrobat files, you can also annotate and add notes to documents that you're sharing over the network.

Obviously the quality of the PCR will vary depending on both your scanner and the state of the original document. But if you're an organisation that needs to share, scan and create PDFs on a regular basis, plus you're a user of Microsoft Office, this is a very useful product.

We're not sure if the "shell" idea is absolutely necessary, but perhaps people engaged in working on this kind of material all and every day could find it a useful way to work.

The close degree of integration extends the other way to - to the applications. So if you've a copy of Microsoft Word, you'll suddenly find you've an icon for PaperPort too. We didn't like that too much - especially as after we uninstalled it, the icon in the Office apps just kept on hanging around. Hey, didn't we dismiss them?

Mind you, Mr Chubbs, if he's anything like our tabyssinians, is probably a dashed nuisance on the desktop. We're impressed with the Scansoft OCR engine compared to the previous version we've used, and tested it on several other documents and books too with good results. If the package is a bit too high powered but you've still got documents you need to manage, Scansoft does some cut down and less expensive packages too. µ