When scanners became a regular fixture in homes, we were promised that the paperless age was nigh. Soon, we were told, we'd work with digital files, and would scan and then recycle anything on paper. It's an IT industry pipe dream but software designed to make handling digital documents easier is improving.

ScanSoft's PaperPort is one of those pieces of software. When it is installed it creates a 'desktop' - a holding area for all documents you are working on. You can scan images from here, either via a scanner, in which case the program will fire up the scanner and import anything it finds, or from a digital camera or existing image files.

Once done, thumbnail images of the imported or scanned files appear in the desktop. You can now edit and print the images or send them to various other applications. For instance, you can open a scanned document in Microsoft Word by clicking on the Word logo in the desktop.

PaperPort will pass the document through optical character recognition (OCR) before sending it to Word, leaving you to edit it. The process isn't flawless, but has improved since its early days.

With our test documents it recognised most words but got stuck on tables and in distinguishing pictures from text. Generally, results were good but required a check. The clearer and cleaner the document, the better, but it won't work with handwriting.

You can also export documents from other applications to PDF, making it easy to create portable documents. Once they are in PaperPort's desktop, you can annotate, highlight and enhance them as you like. For an all-in-one document manager, with OCR and a PDF maker, this is a good choice.

Contact:
ScanSoft 0871 872 0150
www.scansoft.co.uk

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