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Pagis Pro Outmanages Other Document Managers

Integration of scanning, archiving, and retrieval in one piece of software makes for a strong combination.

By Harry McCracken, PCWorld   

Although it's the priciest of three new document managers I evaluated, Pagis's versatility and slick integration with Windows make it a great deal. Caere's $39 PageKeeper Standard 3.0 is worth considering if you're on a tight budget, but Thinkstream's $80 Scan-O-matic 1.1 leaves out some key features.

ScanSoft (a division of Xerox) calls Pagis Pro a scanning suite, an appropriate moniker considering that it incorporates full, integrated versions of the TextBridge Pro optical character recognition software ($79 stand-alone) and MGI's PhotoSuite image editor ($49 stand-alone). The preproduction version I tested does just about everything well. You can convert paper documents into editable text, annotate scans, tweak photos, make quick color copies, and scan in a form to fill out on your PC. The program also creates full-text indexes of the documents in selected folders (or entire drives) for lightning-quick keyword searches. Just as important, Pagis works seamlessly with Windows so you can perform all of those tasks right on the desktop, using thumbnail images of your documents that show up in Windows Explorer. Another big plus: Pagis's XIF file format really compresses scanned magazine and book pages--one page I scanned went from 5.8MB to 317KB--with no degradation in quality.

At less than half the price of Pagis Pro, you wouldn't expect PageKeeper Standard 3.0 to match all of Pagis's features--and it doesn't. It lacks image-editing capabilities, has fewer sophisticated search tools, and only comes with Caere's basic (though highly accurate) OCR engine, among other omissions and weaknesses. For $39 you get straightforward features for scanning documents, annotating and organizing them into folders, and sending them to other applications (such as a word processor or photo editor) with a couple of clicks. The preproduction version of PageKeeper I tested does beat Pagis Pro in one major respect: It performs OCR on scanned text documents in the background while you continue to work. (Pagis's OCR seizes control of the program until it's done.) Though it's not for power users, PageKeeper is worth a look if you've got a cheap scanner without a document manager. Caere plans to release a beefier edition later this year.

A new entry in the document-manager race, Thinkstream's Scan-O-matic 1.1 ($80) is a mixed bag; I looked at a shipping copy. On the plus side, it has wizards for tasks such as turning scanned images into HTML files and posting them to a Web site. It also has nice features for annotating documents and editing images. Unlike the competition, however, Scan-O-matic leaves out built-in OCR and can't search for text within files. The user interface could use some work, too--its icons are among the most cryptic I've seen. Also, there's no simple way to get pages off the desktop and into a variety of other applications--a crucial feature that makes Pagis Pro and PageKeeper much more useful.

For the complete story, see the August issue of PC World magazine.