Adobe Acrobat Capture 3 Personal Edition review

Acrobat Capture 3 is Adobe's latest offering for converting paper documents into electronic ones. But this isn't just a simple OCR (optical character recognition) package; it's a serious business tool with a price tag to match.

Adobe's PDFs are platform-independent electronic documents that can be distributed and read using an Acrobat Reader. Adobe invented Acrobat in 1993 to convert the textual and graphical content of existing electronic documents into PDF. It took a while to catch on, but PDF is now the unofficially accepted standard for electronic document portability, with Adobe's recently released version of Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC PDA users being an acknowledgement of this fact. There are also many third-party applications capable of reading and even creating PDF files.

While you can create PDF versions of existing word-processing, HTML, DTP or other electronic document types relatively easily, there's considerable demand for the convenient management of paper documents by converting them into PDF files too. This can be from magazines, books and third-party correspondence.

This is where Acrobat Capture 3 comes in with its single-user/single-station Personal Edition. Incidentally, you're limited to creating 20,000 searchable PDFs, although compared to the older version there's now no longer a limit to the number of image-only PDFs created. To count your quota, Adobe provides a parallel printer port dongle, meaning there's no support for legacy-free workstations that don't have parallel printer ports. Once you've used up your quota, you need to buy a new package.

If you require a more powerful solution, Adobe offers an unlimited cluster version of Capture 3 that can accelerate throughput by distributing the processing load among registered workstations on the network.

It's important to note that Capture 3 features a number of key differences over its version 2 sibling, which remains on sale, incidentally. The new version will only work on Windows 2000, NT or XP. If you're stuck with Windows 95 or 98, you're subsequently stuck with Capture 2. However, by committing to the NT code base, Adobe is making Capture 3 a more robust application that should be able to handle more.

Capture 3 supports 16 languages, compared to eight with version 2, and now supports specialised legal, medical and scientific OCR dictionaries. Another advanced new feature is its implementation of automatic intra-document link creation. It can also output PDF Searchable Image (Compact) and HTML files supporting frames and CSS formatting.

There are comprehensive changes to the process of converting scanned documents, as the user interface has been radically altered to display practically any relevant detail relating to the workflow process. Workflow templates can also be reused to save time. Table recognition has been improved and a Deskew Agent has been implemented. The Reviewer module for tidying up documents is more powerful and now copes with link management and global font styles. Manual control over text, text and graphics and graphics-only zone differentiation is now provided. Document size efficiency can be improved through colour segmentation, and Capture 3 is designed to produce cleaner results with better format retention.

Undoubtedly, Adobe has worked intensively to make Capture 3 a perceptibly big step on from Capture 2. The evidence seems to be that, with some effort, you should get improved results. But how well does it work?

The jam-packed user interface may be neat and tidy, but there's so much of it. The 'get you going' leaflet recommends a hand-held tour using the sample scanned document image provided. However, it warns that this bit can take close to an hour.