When PaperPort 9 came out, the world of PDF users in the office realm stood up and took notice, because PDF became the native format of the ScanSoft’s desktop document management tool.

PaperPort 10, released today, takes it to the next level, adding a bushel basket of features to help the general business user more quickly and easily organize, create, split, merge, e-mail, and index their PDFs:

Meta-search: While several next-generation software packages and Web sites such as Google offer desktop document searches, the one built into PaperPort offers a feature no one else’s does: OCR. When the user sets preferences to do so, PaperPort can index images and image+text document--PDF and otherwise--and search them. Furthermore, the indexing can be set to take place when the computer isn’t being used, such as early morning hours.

PDF Create: Included in the package are the ScanSoft PDF creation utility PDF Create! There's also a Web capture-to-PDF features.

Drag-and-drop split/merge: With something ScanSoft calls the “split desktop”--basically an interface in which you can open two folders at once and drag files one to the other--this PaperPort offers a simpler, fewer-steps route to merging documents of different types (Word, Excel, RTF, graphics files, other PDFs) into a single PDF. Furthermore, it also offers thumbnail views of PDF pages (it had offered only file icons before) that can be dragged and dropped into a new PDF.

“There was a time when Adobe was using the vernacular ‘e-paper’ for PDF,” says Robert Weideman, ScanSoft senior vice president of marketing. “With PaperPort, it really is electronic paper--you’re literally taking pages and stacking them up as if it were paper. You can thumb through the pages without opening the document and look at the pages. We really do treat PDF as electronic paper and bring familiar metaphors of the physical world on to your PC, but in a way that’s much more efficient.”

Image editing tools: Up to one-fourth of PaperPort users got the “special edition” OEM version with a scanner. The application includes some basic touch-up features such as crop, rotate, and sharpen that work in a visual way tuned to the office user, i.e. the brightness control is shown as a grid of nine possible settings, and the user double-clicks on the one that looks best, instead of a rat's nest of sliders or blanks in which to key numeric values.

Export to PDF 1.3, 1.4, or 1.5: While many office users don’t know--or if they do, they don’t care--about the difference between the PDF specs, a few IT managers and government users need to “dumb down” their PDFs so that people running archaic versions of Reader can share critical documents.

Security: Documents can be password-protected, and PaperPort offers 40- or 120-bit encryption, that works when a document is opened in Acrobat or Reader, too.

Collaboration tools: PaperPort can generate sticky notes and annotations, which can be seen in Reader, too.

Weideman points out that while some of PaperPort’s features overlap with Acrobat, the company doesn’t view it as a direct competitor to Acrobat. As such, PaperPort--at a much lower price point than Acrobat--didn’t experience a big sales boost when Acrobat 6 Pro came out at a higher price point in 2003. PaperPort does, however, have some four million registered users.

“What full Acrobat does--Standard and Professional--and what PaperPort does are completely different things,” he says, characterizing Acrobat more of a document collaboration tool, and PaperPort more of a system to manage documents. “We don’t really see Acrobat as a competitive product. You may see users that care about PDF creation and some of the other features that overlap as competition, but it’s rare that somebody going to buy either of those two products just to create PDFs.”