Slightly off topic Charles (other than it's Nuance), but I would like, in the fullness of time, to get some insight into why PaperPort has so terribly imploded over the last few years. Knowing nothing, one can only imagine the obvious reasons - Nuance has taken most of its developers out of PaperPort and put them into, eg, Naturally Speaking (which is a very good product), or, the core developers had some grudge with Nuance and walked out. My version of PaperPort, Ver. 10, is barely usable; I do still use it but very begrudgingly (trying to print one page for instance is impossible as it always insists on printing all pages - I could go on but life is too short.) I now use Acrobat to do all the viewing, printing, etc..

By the way, I saw last week in the Green Guide in the Mac section next to yours, that a small company has developed a programme called Yep. This is similar to PaperPort and looks very promising indeed. No Windows version, and none planned. So maybe a good reason to go out and buy a Mac.

But I think it would make an interesting story how a piece of software that had been developing so well could have fallen over so comprehensively. Especially when there is no competition.

Actually I'm Jeremy, not Charles, but let's leave that aside and discuss PaperPort...

I used PaperPort v1, which at that stage was only available as part of a hardware package, which came with a nifty portable sheetfed scanner. It was a really nice product, and unique at the time (IIRC).

It's certainly not looking so impressive nowadays, but it has some nice features. It does a good job of cleaning up scanned docs for OCR'ing, and most interesting is its form-filling software, which is still the best I've found. I scan in all the forms I use regularly (e.g. telegraphic transfer form for the bank) and fill them out in PaperPort, and then fax them from there.

I think you will find that the offer is for US residents

It seemed to work fine for me. I live in Australia. I used the "Asia/Pacific" selection.

I've encountered this sort of pricing anomaly several times - particularly with Ulead video editing software.

For example, you can buy Ulead's latest consumer editing program, VideoStudio 11, much more cheaply from the Ulead web site than from local resellers.

Download price from Ulead: $US100/$A125 approx
Local list price: $A199
Local 'street' price: $A178.

Upgrade for VS11:

Download price from Ulead: $US60/$A75 approx
Local list price: $A116
Local 'street' price: $A97.

Seriously, why would you buy locally when the price is so far out of line?