Scanning suites. packages

Home Office Computing, August, 1998 by Wayne Kawamoto

Swimming in a sea of paper? These document manager/optical character recognition combos can help keep your head above the rising tide

AFTER SETTING UP YOUR scanner, expect to go through an extended period of "scanitis," a condition involving the uncontrollable urge to turn every paper on your desk into an electronic document in your PC. Whether it's a memo, invoice, fax, or newspaper or magazine article, you'll soon find yourself placing the page face down and clicking your scanning software's Import button without thinking twice.

Now that you've tamed the paper monster that nearly devoured your desk, how do you handle the tidal wave of documents and images you scanned into your computer? With today's multigigabyte hard disks, you'll wonder where on your PC you plunked down that client order or urgent fax from the main office. Relax: Chaotic hard disks can be cured with a document imaging manager, or what we call a scanning suite.

Basically, scanning suites are programs that store and organize your scanned documents as electronic files on your computer's hard disk. These programs also come equipped with powerful search tools that help you locate the stored files quickly. When the title of a long-lost report no longer rings a bell, scanning suites can search for documents by keywords, by a string of text, or by a particular file format type.

Combined with either a flatbed or a sheetfed scanner, scanning suites consist of at least two basic parts: the file manager and the optical character recognition (OCR) software, which translates the images of text into digital text ready for editing. After scanning a document, you can save the image as a graphic file and store it in the file manager. You can also fax a file with your PC's modem or send it as an e-mail attachment. Or, if you need to make changes to a file, you can simply use the scanning suite's OCR program to convert the document into a text file ready for editing in Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect.

For this Buyer's Guide, we examined eight scanning suites and, in the "Showdown in the OCR Corral" sidebar, took a look at two leading OCR packages. (Given the wealth of Windows 95 scanning suites, we didn't include any Macintosh programs, which are in short supply in this category. Would-be Mac document managers can check out Dominion Software's Working Papers, available for download from www. dominion.com.) We took a close look at how the suites managed, stored, and located scanned files. Then we tested how easy it was to launch the OCR engine and how well the scanning suites worked with other programs, such as fax software, word processors, and more.

For the OCR torture test, we created a "dirty" typed document (relax, it was profanity-free) by printing a letter and then faxing and photocopying it to add "noise"--the stray bits of ink, smudges, and dust that form on faxed and photocopied documents. To strain the OCR engines even further, we used small fonts--9- and 10-point--to reduce the space between letters and words. We also scanned in documents on an angle and included complex magazine `layouts with columns, headlines, and pictures.

PageKeeper Standard

WIN 95

Want a low-cost scanning suite that does the basics? We tested a beta version of PageKeeper Standard from Caere, the maker of the popular OmniPage Pro OCR engine and other scanning programs. Caere also promises an upcoming Pro version that will ship later this year. We had high expectations for PageKeeper Standard as a low-cost solution with competent capabilities, and it generally delivered, but reminded us that you often get what you pay for.

PageKeeper Standard organizes documents in Explorer-style windows that list folders along the left- hand side and display thumbnail-size views that represent each document on the right-hand side. You can view files from within the program and use its decent annotation tools to add comments and mark up documents simply by highlighting areas in the text. A true document manager, PageKeeper Standard lets you easily import documents from other applications, and it does a skillful job of searching for files once you've stored them.

To locate documents, PageKeeper Standard allows you to search by name or look for text that appears in documents. Caere intentionally limits the search capabilities in the Standard version so that it can offer more with PageKeeper Pro.

Although the Standard product does a competent job as a document manager, it can't directly convert text for use in applications such as Word, it doesn't include photo-editing tools, and it can't straighten crooked scans.

In our testing, PageKeeper Standard's OCR was a noteworthy performer (93.8 percent on the 10point text and 94.3 percent on the 9-point text) that ranked among the best, just below Pagis Pro. If you're on a budget and you need a reliable scanning suite, PageKeeper's low price of $40 is worth a look. But if you need a more powerful package, consider the high-achieving PaperPort Deluxe for only $10 more.