Nuance Scansoft PaperPort 11 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 17 May 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Ben Pitt

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

PaperPort takes a holistic approach to paper management, with OCR, powerful search facilities, document browsing and previewing and the ability to annotate documents with virtual Post-it notes and highlighter pens.

It appears as a printer driver to allow documents from other applications to be saved in PDF format. This potentially valuable feature is diluted because text appears as a bitmap rather than smooth fonts, even though editable text is hidden behind the image, so text looks scruffy.

Generating PDFs from scanned images is more versatile, with a choice of editable text behind or replacing the scanned image. But it's not possible to replace text areas with editable text while keeping images intact, nor to export OCR documents with images to Word. In fact, exporting to Word is poor, with only font formatting and no layout details preserved. Word documents are displayed in PaperPort without embedded images, but holding down Ctrl while double-clicking opens them in Word.

PaperPort's biggest flaw is its lack of proofing and spellchecking facilities. OCR is fully automatic and is performed as soon as the scan is complete. There's no way to intervene and correct mistakes. This isn't such a problem when exporting to a word processor as files can be edited after export, but for creating PDFs it's a serious hindrance. Character recognition was the fastest in our tests, but accuracy was the lowest when working with small font sizes.

PaperPort's basic OCR support is perhaps forgivable in light of its low price and range of other features. However, the poor results of its OCR output diminish the usefulness of its search and other facilities, too.

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