For thos of you who haven’t come across it – Paperport is a useful scanning and document management system from Nuance (Scansoft). Given away with a lot of scanners as a cut down version it really comes into its own when you use the professional version for scanning and organising pdfs. I have been using the tool through the various iterations from version 7 and over time additional features and tools have been incrementally added. So it was a nice surprise when I got the word that a new version – Paperport 12 had been released.
I’ve used the product in many ways over the years – including presenting the documents stored in Paperport to a remote user with an ftp server and third party utility to make the data appear local to the user. I’ve also used it as a cost effective shared document repository for a legal practice. Its a versatile tool and can be used to visually manipulate pdf and .max files (the applications own format).
Due to the fact that I use a lot of Nuance / Scansoft products – like Omnipage, PDF Convertor, Dragon dictate – the installation recognised that I had the latest version of viewer for PDF convertor and did not replace it with the installation alternative.
Nuances own blurb on the product
NEW! Intuitive Ribbon User Interface places controls at your fingertips on a set of tabbed ribbon style toolbars that logically group functions with clear text descriptions. The new Scan Now button lets you scan documents with one click – without having to change to the scanner settings view. A customizable Quick Access Toolbar appears above the ribbon toolbars so you can put your most frequently used features in one easy-to-find location on your desktop. Brilliant!
NEW! PDF Viewer Plus PDF handling application enables you to open and display PDF files over 500% faster than the old, general-purpose PageViewer with less required memory and smaller file sizes. Fully compatible with Adobe® Acrobat®, PDF Viewer Plus optimizes the rendering resolution for each element on the page to yield a cleaner display while being optimized for print.
NEW! Enhanced PDF Features including improved annotations, and dynamic or transparent stamps make working with PDF files a breeze. Expanded annotation tools afford more options for Notes, Text and Lines. Transparent stamps let you sign PDF documents with your scanned signature. Another PDF breakthrough is the ability to touch-up images within a PDF itself using the ImageViewer and Nuance’s SET (Scanner Enhancement Technology) Tools. Simply make your adjustments then close the ImageViewer and your modified images automatically appear back inside the PDF. Amazing.
NEW! Expanded FormTyper™ is now integrated into the PDF Viewer Plus and uses improved Logical Form Recognition® technology to automatically detect form elements like check boxes. So not only do you get more accurate form conversion, but you’ll also enjoy access to form attributes and a full suite of controls including: Text attributes, Field box attributes, Default values, Default format, Actions & more.
NEW! Searchable PDF files are available through Scanner Profiles, via a right-click Save As operation on your PaperPort Desktop, or directly within the new PDF Viewer Plus application. Creating searchable PDF files makes the content of your scanned paper documents or image files accessible to search engines such as Windows® Desktop Search or Google®.
NEW! 42% More Accurate OCR yields greater success when searching the content of Searchable PDF file archives. Thanks to the advancements made through Hyper-Binary Conversion, scanned images are now recognized with a 42% improvement in accuracy! What’s more, you can now apply language settings to OCR for even greater accuracy in all supported languages.
NEW! Digital Camera Input enables you to take a picture of a document and accurately convert it into a text document within PaperPort. The Send To Bar options for text applications have now been updated to include a PaperPort OCR option for digital camera correction. This is accomplished by applying special 3D-deskewing algorithms that flatten page images and correct distortions, thereby increasing the accuracy of the resulting text document. It’s as easy as point, click and convert.
NEW! ScanDirect™ utility is the easiest way to scan directly into specific applications like email, PDF Viewer Plus, Microsoft SharePoint, Word, Excel, and more – independent of PaperPort running. Imagine the time you’ll save!
So if the improvements are worth the three year wait from the last release I will be very happy. More after I get to grips with the latest release of a favourite tool.