Looks interesting OCRman, and welcome.  I will be very interested when you get to some of the cheaper and free alternatives, i don't do a lot of OCR work but its incredibly frustrating when you know thats what you need, but the price is just way too much for the amount of use versus other more important things. 

Grorgy, there are some freebies available, but I haven't had a chance to look at them yet:

SimpleOCR - http://www.simpleocr.com/Download.asp
GOCR (Open Source) - http://jocr.sourceforge.net/
Tesseract OCR - Open Source - get a frontend here http://softi.co.uk/tess.htm
M$ Office - Microsoft Office Document Imaging (under Office Tools if you have Office installed!)

OCRman

Looks like a good job OCRman - I'll be interested to read your conclusions.

I've got PaperPort 11 (not Pro) and OmniPage 15 Pro both at home and at work. I've got a Canon 5000F flatbed scanner at home and a Canon 2050c document scanner on my desk at work. I do quite a bit of scanning at both places, but what I really use PaperPort more for is document management - and mostly for documents that are not scanned, but are typical text document, spreadsheet, PowerPoint type files that either I or my colleagues created.

Once you've told PaperPort what drives and folders to look in on your computer or network, it displays thumbnails for the files it finds - not just stuff that it scanned.  It knows how to display quite a few file types. Because I organize my files in folders by project or technology, I can usually get to the folder I need pretty easily - then it's just a case of browsing the thumbnails until I recognize the file I'm looking for. At that point you can display a larger view of it in the internal viewer, or you can open it in its normal program. There are buttons for the normal file manager functions like arranging by name, size, date, type, etc, but you can also drag the thumbnails around on the screen to arrange them differently.

There is a file indexing and search function (All-in-One-Search), but I've found it to be pretty slow. I think that if it runs into pdf files that are images rather than documents, it tries to do an OCR first and then index the file. I normally use Copernic or something like that if I need to search for text in a file.

It does also have some basic image editing/enhancing functions, but I don't use them.

I've used OmniPage once in a while - for basic documents it works fairly well, but if there are very many fonts, columns, images, tables, etc - it has problems.

I can't remember which, but either PaperPort or OmniPage came bundled with the PDF Creator and PDF Converter - both version 3. I've used PDF converter a few times on simple documents. When I'm reseachting stuff on the web, I'll frequently send selected parts of web pages to the pdf printer driver and save the selections as individual pdf files. It's nice because they are searchable. Later, if I need to, I'll convert them back into a text document from which I can cut-and-paste. I also get quite a few protected pdf files, and it won't open them.

Hi OCRman,

Thanks for the link to the comparison matrix! I've just taken a look and it's very comprehensive. Very nice 

I've been using PaperPort 11 for quite a while (I think the last version was 2006!), but have been waiting for an upgrade since version 11 doesn't seem to handle MS Office 2007 files very well (only displays an icon rather than a thumbnail of the file).

Nuance has just sent me an offer to upgrade to the new PaperPort 12, but the upgrade price is $100! (discount from the regulular $200 price) Probably a little to steep for me right now.

Has anyone use it yet? Can it display the Office 2007 file thumbnails?

Re: Paperport 12 Pro, here's the first review that I've seen (from AppScout): http://www.appscout.com/2009/09/nuance_paperport_12_pdf_organi.php.

It doesn't specifically state, but implies, that Office 2007 files are now shown as thumbnails.