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NOTE: Pagis Pro has NOT been updated to work in Windows XP.

ScanSoft PagisPro

So what is Pagis Pro?

All software is on one CD. There is a printed Pagis Pro Users Guide, but it is only a small part (installation and overview) of the very large Pagis Pro Users Guide, and separate TextBridge Pro Users Guide, that are provided as PDF files on the CD. These manuals are viewed or printed with the Adobe Acrobat reader utility. They are excellent manuals, extremely detailed with specific clear description of every feature.

• A big part of Pagis Pro is TextBridge Pro. Textbridge Pro is very sophisticated OCR software (Optical Character Recognition), which converts a scanned image of a text page into editable text characters for your word processor. It is easy to use, and it will work standalone, or from the menu of most word processors, or integrated into Pagis Pro. TextBridge Pro generally can preserve the original page formatting in regard to fonts, columns, tables, and color images (if desired, there are many options). There are installable dictionaries for 56 languages!

• Pagis is a scanning suite of utilities for both text and color documents. It is much like other good scanning suites until you look closer to discover it adds very many useful options that the others don't have. It provides easy-to-use scanning, color or B&W copying, copying to printer or fax, and image editing facilities.

  Pagis will scan photos, and Kai's PhotoSoap2 is included to that end. However, the strength of Pagis is that it is an exceptional document system, and is designed to optimize text documents (size, quality, convenience, versatility), with numerous strong options and image enhancing capabilities such as document straightening, background color removal, etc. It will scan and store multiple page documents, including for fax destinations. It will scan and print collated copies (prints pages already sorted, ready to staple).

  One major option is that it provides the ability to type text into fields to fill out scanned forms (it is NOT forms software as such, but you can fill out scanned forms very conveniently).

  About any document file format I can imagine is supported (except Adobe pdf). Appendix A of the Pagis manual is overwhelming list of supported programs and supported graphic file formats and word processor formats.   Let me show you.

  This 3-page list shows:

  • A list of file formats supported by Pagis Pro.
  • A sample of Textbridge OCR of tables.
  • A sample of Textbridge HTML output.

  These tables were scanned and converted to OCR in TextBridge Pro. TextBridge also created the HTML file shown here.

  Here's what I did to create those tables (only Textbridge Pro was used).   I printed on paper the pages from the PDF Pagis Users Manual, simply so I could scan them. In TextBridge, I selected Page Type "Any Page", and specified Page Format "Table". I selected Picture Output as B&W. I selected the' the TextBridge AUTO button, and reloaded the flatbed when it said MORE PAGES twice as it scanned. Then I specified output type as HTML. Normally I don't use AUTO, I prefer to mark the zones myself, but this time it was AUTO. The CONTENTS and INDEX buttons are printed on the page (from the PDF document), but they were unimportant for this case. They could be edited out (either by zoning the OCR or editing the HTML), but I did nothing here.

  Every detail of this program seems awesome.

• Pagis is also a document management utility, providing disk indexing and search capability. You can associate titles and keywords with your images, and then search for image files on your disk using the plain words you choose to describe the image, like "Jane's Wedding".   Or you could quickly locate all images referencing the word Jane, or all of those referencing the word Wedding, and much more.   It can search the words in the content of the file too. It is not limited to your documents or photos. Its search can include all files on your disk or CD-RW drive or a network server. This can include any files, such as your word processor files. It works much like a greatly enhanced Win95 FIND tool, but adds several search options and your images too. Its smart and fuzzy search options can find misspelled items, or words that "sound like" the specified words, however you configure it. You have not seen anything like this, it can be as simple or as complex as you desire.

• Pagis provides the XIF file format which is optimized for scanned documents, and which creates very small files with better text quality.   This is the heart of the document system (OK, this system has several hearts, TextBridge Pro, the Pagis file management system, the XIF files, etc).  

  In the simplest description of XIF files, Pagis can (optionally) separate and optimally compress and store the image portion(s) of the document in the file using JPG compression (typically at 100 dpi for small size, but resolution is your choice). The text portion(s) are separated and stored in the same file typically as 300 dpi Line art for minimum size and maximum quality. If using the Pagis scanning interface, the scanner makes two passes to accomplish this. If using your scanners native TWAIN user interface (optional, and required for a few scanner models), the Pagis scan utility and the XIF format make only one pass, but still have the ability to separate the text, text color, background color, and image components of a document image. Two passes is better quality, one pass is faster. Each such component is stored in the XIF file separately, with resolution and compression highly optimized for that one specific data type. All in the one XIF file. The advantages are the smallest file size and the best text quality, without any JPG artifacts on the text.

  You probably would not use XIF files for photos. You could, but there would be no advantage, since a JPG file would be the same thing with better compatibility (and you may prefer a lossless format instead). Pagis can indeed store the photo in JPG or TIF or a VERY great many other file formats too. If you need a tool that can handle very many file formats, you should look at Pagis Pro. But for documents, XIF files do allow you to store the image portion of documents as 100 dpi 24-bit JPG, along with the text portion as 300 dpi line art, both optimum for their purpose, and the text and background color information too, all separately in one XIF file containing many document pages. Now, this can be mind-boggling to contemplate, but it is one fancy document system. More XIF details and samples in the link below.