In a quest to get one step nearer to the paperless office, Visioneer Inc, the Palo Alto, California hardware outfit has launched PaperPort. Designed to be attached to a computer’s central processing unit, the device scans documents, which can then be faxed or electronically distributed. Ammendments to scanned documents can then be made using the accompanying authoring tools which enable text to be circled or post-it notes to be added for proofing text. PaperPort software also displays facsimile modem and optical character recognition software as icons on the screen which user’s click on to send faxes or scanned documents to word processing packages directly from the computer screen. The device will also ship with basic WordScan optical character recognition software, which is also compatible with more advanced character recognition software such as Calera Wordscan, Caere OmniPage and Xerox TextBridge for full colour image scanning. It was launched in the US some eight months ago and Visioneer says its has now sold 50 to 60 units and hopes the device will take off in the small business and home office market in Europe as a cheap low-end scanner-cum-facsimile machine replacement. PaperPort is available now and costs ú370 for either a personal computer or Macintosh version. PaperPort for Workgroups, for sending scanned documents across networked computers will be available in June and will be shipping with software enabling those without the PaperPort within a network to read the scanned documents.
