Damon...Just to prove I learned how. A slightly more positive picture. No pun intended. Thanks again. Jean
June 1997 -- Magazine Review
Scanning Suites
ePaper, ViewOffice Miss the Mark
Scanning requires more than hardware: you need programs to process the photos, drawings, and other
items you feed into your desktop scanner. New-Soft's ViewOffice PowerSuite and Second Glance's
ePaper 1.5 are all-in-one scanning utilities that handle a variety of scanning-related tasks--OCR, image
editing, and archiving--via a unified interface. Although both packages offer a handful of useful scanning
utilities, neither is capable of delivering on all its promises.
Scan It In, File It Away
At the heart of the six modules that make up the ViewOffice suite is PrestoPageManager, the in-box for
your scanned material. You scan images from any TWAIN-compliant scanner into PageManager, and
they appear as thumbnails in PageManager's main window, the Desktop, where you can sort your
scans and group them into folders.
ePaper provides even more elaborate document management. When you scan a document using the
eScan module, even before the scan is completed you can assign it a name and keywords to index it for
future searches. ePaper has a glitzier interface than PageManager, but its filing system is also less
intuitive.
Both suites include low-budget OCR packages that simply aren't powerful enough to deliver consistent,
effective results. PageManager's built-in OCR engine produced far too many errors on anything other
than flawless scans of perfect, single-column text. WordLinx, a second bundled OCR program, fared
just as poorly. TextBridge 3.0, the program that ships with ePaper, provides faster and more accurate
OCR than the ViewOffice programs, but it's still vastly inferior to a full-fledged OCR program.
I was pleasantly surprised by ViewOffice's PrestoBizCard module, which allows you to scan business
cards into the appropriate fields of a built-in contact database. BizCard did a fairly good job of
organizing the information correctly, even with a variety of business cards with different configurations.
Marking It Up
Both ViewOffice and ePaper allow you to scan a form, use a variety of markup and annotation tools to
fill it out on screen, and then print or fax the finished document. Unfortunately, the results are universally
disappointing.
All the tools in ViewOffice's PrestoForms module are clunky and limited; you can't set a default text
style, font, or size for markup text, for example. Even worse, you can't change the color of text or the
attributes of lines and arrows once you've created them. Printing out forms after they've been processed
with PrestoForms yields poor results; annotations don't show up where you expect, and even
high-resolution scans appear mottled.
eMarkup has a better set of tools than PrestoForms for marking up documents and adding annotations:
a bracket tool and a great rubber-stamp tool that can overlay up to 31 different messages, such as
"Paid" or "Received," on your scanned documents, along with the current date. Unfortunately, eMarkup
doesn't allow you to set any preferences, and it crashed my system several times. eMarkup doesn't
make it very easy to fill out scanned forms, either. Frankly, it's easier to roll a form into an old electric
typewriter than it is to use either of these programs for the same purpose.
Graphics Tools
The ViewOffice suite contains a good set of inexpensive image-editing tools for working with color
scans (ePaper, on the other hand, doesn't provide any image-editing software at all). Primarily, you get
a full copy of Microspot's simple but powerful Adobe Photoshop clone, PhotoFix (inexplicably called
ImageFolio on screen). Although PhotoFix lacks Photoshop's more sophisticated features--layers and
channels, for example--it's equipped with a strong set of tools that let you resize images, balance colors,
and retouch details.
In a less practical vein, the suite also contains a special edition of MetaTools' Kai's Power Goo, the
just-for-fun graphics program that lets you distort, swirl, and smudge photos to create hilariously
grotesque pictures. Hardly a productivity tool, but quite entertaining.
The Last Word
The ViewOffice suite has a few duds, but PhotoFix and PowerGoo alone are worth the suite's price,
assuming you don't already own Photoshop. Although ePaper offers slightly better OCR and markup
tools, it's more than twice the price; it has no photo-retouching features; and it ships with a sloppy,
incomplete manual that is filled with spelling errors, redundancies, and inaccuracies. If you're really
serious about OCR, though, your best bet is to forgo both of these packages (which offer little more
than the bundles that already come with low-priced scanners) and invest in one good OCR program,
such as Caere's OmniPage Pro (see review in this issue) or Xerox's full-scale product, TextBridge Pro.
Weak OCR is worse than none at all.--JOSEPH SCHORR
ePaper 1.5
RATING: Two Stars/3.8
PROS: Good markup tools; can catalog scans as they're created.
CONS: No preferences for markup tools; buggy interface; terrible documentation.
COMPANY: Second Glance Software (360/692-3694, secondglance.com).
LIST PRICE: $169.
ViewOffice PowerSuite
RATING: Three Stars/5.0
PROS: Inexpensive; solid image-editing tools; business-card scanning capabilities.
CONS: Weak annotation tools; unimpressive OCR features; poor forms performance.
COMPANY: NewSoft (510/445-8600; tophat.com).
LIST PRICE: $79.
June 1997 page: 64
Copyright c 1997 Macworld Communications, Inc.
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