Pagis Pro update can scan to beat the
band ScanSoft's
suite of OCR products also tunes up Windows
interface
By Herb
Bethoney, PC Week Labs July 1, 1998
Xerox Scansoft Inc.'s Pagis Pro 2.0 combines
several companies' tools into an extensive suite of scanning
products with impressive performance and accuracy.
The most significant feature of Pagis Pro 2.0
software--the new version is worth buying for this
alone--allows users to convert any Windows folder to a Pagis
Pro folder. These folders extend Windows Explorer's file
management capabilities by providing a thumbnail view of each
file in a folder for quick identification.
In PC Week Labs' tests of Pagis Pro 2.0, which shipped this
month, it performed OCR (optical character recognition) on a
par with Caere Corp.'s OmniPage Pro and Visioneer Inc.'s
ProOCR100 OCR applications. Pagis Pro runs on Windows 95,
Windows 98 and Windows NT but, unlike Caere's and Visioneer's
products, does not run on Macintoshes.
In Pagis Pro's list view, when we held the cursor over a
file name, a thumbnail image popped up to help identify the
file. Also valuable is the undo feature, which quickly returns
a Windows folder to its original state.
Although Pagis Pro's tool bar can be launched separately
from the application, allowing more flexibility in tool bar
placement, we would have liked the option to select a less
cluttered approach, perhaps by docking the tool bar to the
main window.
The heart of the suite is the Pagis Pro scanning and
document organizing tool. Pagis Pro has a clean interface
design, and the program smoothly integrates a Windows
Explorer-like file system for managing scanned documents.
Pagis Pro 2.0 works with just about any TWAIN scanner or
digital camera. After a document has been converted to text,
users can save the file to most popular word processor and
spreadsheet application formats.
In tests, Pagis Pro did a good job of maintaining a
document's structure, but, like Visioneer's ProOCR100, the
application was not quite as consistently accurate as Caere's
OmniPage in recognizing such page elements as graphics, tables
and charts.
Using Verity Inc.'s Topic search engine, Pagis Pro's new
search tool lets users assign a keyword to a scanned document
or image for quick retrieval. Users can also index all of the
documents on their local hard drive, network drive or
removable media. With the program's natural-language search
capabilities, we could retrieve a file from a 2GB hard drive
containing thousands of documents within a second or two.
Pagis Pro 2.0 includes MGI Software Inc.'s PhotoSuite image
manipulation program. Like Thinkstream Inc.'s Scan-o-matic,
PhotoSuite lets users send photographs and documents via
e-mail or from within PhotoSuite. Although PhotoSuite isn't as
comprehensive an image editor as Adobe Systems Inc.'s
Photoshop or Jasc Software Inc.'s Paint Shop Pro, it provides
the basic tools to crop, rotate, sharpen and color-correct
just about any image.
See the Executive
Summary for Pagis Pro 2.0.
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