Xerox Corp has launched TextBridge Professional Edition 3.0, an extension of TextBridge, its personal computer-based optical character recognition software that can convert scanned information into word processing, desktop publishing or other computer files. Xerox says that current optical character recognition products on the market are built upon traditional text-based recognition technology, and are ill-equipped to reproduce compound documents containing text, graphics, and tables. Other programs provide a close but inflexible approximation of an original page layout by creating artificial text frames during processing, but this means the scanned page cannot be edited. TextBridge Professional Edition, on the other hand, reconstructs documents so that they can be edited, tables and all. This editability has been achieved by integrating Xerox’s Document Recognition Technology into the application; this enables the program to reconstruct a scanned document as it was originally designed and deliver fully editable text flow. TextBridge Professional Edition can be launched directly from the application in which the user is working via Instant Access OCR. In addition, TextBridge Professional Edition’s In-Place Proofreader provides proofing and editing directly in the user’s word processor. In addition to document recognition and integration with word processors, TextBridge Professional Edition offers format retention with full editability; cell table formatting; OLE 2.0 drag and drop; point and foreign language recognition; multi-page Tag Image File Format; batch processing of TIFF files; re-usable templates; and a user-defined dictionary. TextBridge Professional Edition 3.0 is available now, at $350.
