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Pagis Pro 97: Scan, Fax and OCR in One Package
I plan to make copies of a few old family photos as Christmas presents this year. This can be expensive, especially if your family is large. Once I bought the now justified scanner, I found that I needed something more up-to-date than the scanning softwa re that came with it.
When installation of Pagis Pro 97 is complete, a Pagis Inbox is added to your desktop. Each item you scan, copy or fax can be saved into this folder, or you have the option of changing to another folder prior to scanning.
The Pagis Pro 97 Tool Bar (Scan, Copy, Fax, Edit, Search, Update, Help) plops itself into the middle of your desktop and the Send To Bar installs itself on the right edge. These are convenient as long as you are using Pagis Pro 97, but I'd rather have a shortcut on my desktop so I don't have to minimize or close the toolbar every time I boot my computer.
Scan, Copy, Fax: These three actions are basically the same; you place a document or photo (or jelly beans) onto the scanner, then either scan a copy to save to your Pagis Inbox as a .XIF (Xerox Image File), copy it to your printer or fax it. With Scan, you are given a choice of several formats, such as Any Document, Letter, Photo, Magazine Article, etc. Depending on which of these you choose, you can then click on Properties for further refinement of your document. The same holds true for Copy and Fax, the initial choices coinciding with what you wish to do.
Since I wish to give my daughter copies of the old photos I have, I can fax them to her, knowing she has a fax modem and photo capable printer, but that'll be long distance. I know! I could scan them, save them to the Pagis Inbox and put them on my websi te for her to pick up. OK, I can send them e-mail. So, I print them out myself and mail them. The point is that with Pagis Pro 97, you have options; just drag and drop your scanned document onto the appropriate folder on your Send To bar at the right of your screen.
Very much worth mentioning is Xerox' new file compression technology and image enhancement. Full page color artwork or photos scanned at 200 dpi will compress to about 250 KB as .xif. A color magazine page scanned at 100 dpi would be roughly 100 KB (norm ally 2 MB). In scanning pages of mixed text and graphics, you are allowed separate dpi settings further reducing file sizes.
Aha! Proprietary, you say. Not to worry; Xerox has made available a free .xif viewer (1.38MB) that you can download and freely distribute with your scanned images. You can also view .tif, .pcx, .dcx, .bmp, .jpg and .gif files with this viewer.
For converting text documents to editable text, you need an OCR package, usually not included in a graphics scanning package. Well, folks, Xerox has outdone itself by including TextBridge Pro OCR with Pagis Pro 97. For accuracy, DocuRT employs a set of d ocument "experts", each tuned to specific aspects of character recognition, such as problems specific to low-resolution and fax images. Lexifier (tm) identifies patterns of strings, such as phone numbers and zip codes, etc.
Space constraints allow me to cover only the tip of the iceberg. If you'd like more information, point your web browser to http://www.pagis.com where you can read the full story.
Nancy Ward is a HAL-PC member and HALNet registrar.
Remember when Windows 3.1 with paintbrush first came out? Everyone was giving you a superior program called Paint Shop Pro, one of the first shareware programs. Paint Shop Pro is still around, stronger and better than ever. It is still far superior to th e new Windows 95 paint program and now reads over 35 file formats including Internet graphics.
Paint Shop Pro v4.12 is a graphics manipulation and paint program for Windows 95 & NT (sorry 3.1 users). Its features include painting, photo retouching, image or color enhancement and editing. It comes with batch conversion, screen and scanner support w ith over 150 terrific images plus an image browser.
Paint Shop Pro lets you paint like an artist. You can choose a paintbrush, pen, pencil, marker, crayon, airbrush, and charcoal or create your own brush. You can use the retouching brush for photo improvements. The image enhancement and editing has image arithmetic that allows you to add, subtract or multiply pixels for the most detailed adjustments. Its special effects include drop shadow, buttonize, seamless welder, gradient fill, hot wax coating, chisel and cutouts, more effects than a designer needs.
All of the standard tools are also included like cropping, filtering, sizing, rotating, mirroring etc. Its screen capture utility can be used to copy an active window or full screen picture. These screen captures can be used to create slide shows. The im age browser gives you the ability to visually search directories using thumbnail pictures of over 35 different formats. It also is TWAIN compliant for all scanner support.
Installation is very easy. You can run it from the CD or install on the hard drive, which takes 10 megabytes of space.
The program needs 8 megs of RAM on a 486 processor or better, with an SVGA monitor.
It has a super training program on the CD; however, with so many features, it is not an easy program to learn.
Street price is about $50, a good price but not a great price due to tough competition in the same dollar range. The program is made by JASC Inc. Technical support is available through mail, the Internet or by phone, 612/930-9171, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Todd Rosen, a HAL-PC member, is the Internet Instructor and SBC Administrator/Process Specialist.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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