Scanning suites. packages

Home Office Computing, August, 1998 by Wayne Kawamoto

PaperPort Deluxe 5.2

WIN 95 /MAC

If this Buyer's Guide were a beauty contest, PaperPort

Deluxe would walk away with the crown, thanks to its clean and uncluttered design. And its beauty is more than skin deep--Visioneer's package manages scanned documents like an expert.

PaperPort offers the best Explorer-style approach, which features folders on the left-hand side of the screen and displays large thumbnails in a window on the right. The interface gives you convenient options for faxing, printing, or using data in applications. All you have to do is drag a document onto the application bar at the bottom of the screen, and you're ready to work.

Using the TextBridge OCR engine, PaperPort Deluxe is quite adept at converting documents (94.8 percent on our 10point text and 92.3 percent on the 9-point text). Along with Pagis Pro, it turned in some of the most accurate OCR conversions among the programs here, but it didn't maintain page layouts. To find documents, PaperPort quickly looks for text within documents and ranks them by relevance with a number.

We loved the extras that come bundled with PaperPort Deluxe, including FormTyper, a form data-entry tool, and Intuit ExpensAble SE, a Quicken-like program that lets you scan receipts and attach them to expense reports. If you're a regular business traveler and need to expense your meals, lodging, and airline tickets, you'll rely on this program for every trip.

We were also impressed with the strong photo-editing tool, which allowed us to add notes to a document and adjust and preview an image's contrast, brightness, and color.

At press time, Visioneer announced the release of PaperPort Deluxe 5.3, which will support more scanners and include Visioneer OCR, the company's own text conversion program. According to a Visioneer spokesperson, the new update will be available by the time you read this.

Without a doubt, PaperPort Deluxe is a very strong scanning suite that's easy to use, easy on the eyes, and easy on the wallet with a price tag of $50.

PaperVue 1.0

WIN 95

Although Zydeco PaperVue uses an Explorer-style approach like PaperPort Deluxe, its design has a slightly coarse, unpolished feel to it. We had to switch our Windows 95 system fonts so we could display and read certain menus, and the program's OCR engine was one of the poorest performers here (83.6 percent on the 10-point text, and the converted 9-point text was unreadable).

The design isn't difficult to understand or use, however, because it resembles that of the other programs for the most part. We organized documents, scanned images into folders, and used PaperVue's adequate search tools to locate keywords or text within documents. We found the annotation tools to be satisfactory for adding lines, circles, and squares, for highlighting text and attaching sticky notes. Beyond these features, however, PaperVue can't import or work with Word or other files on your hard disk, it lacks photo-editing tools, and it comes with no printed documentation. We did like the built-in proofreading tools that helped us correct the OCR conversions, a rarity in document management programs.