What is Kofax VRS?

VRS reduces the time involved in manual document preparation and enhances the quality of scanned images. Capturing high-quality images is critical to the rest of the document management process because image quality significantly impacts the success of data extraction, recognition, and retrieval.

Perfect Images
Scanning is only half the battle. The most important part about capturing images is your ability to find, retrieve, and use them later. The superior quality of VirtualReScan® (VRS)-created images means documents are easier to index and easier to read.
Reduced Document Preparation with Content-based Rotation
No need to turn all your documents to the same orientation before scanning. VRS will automatically analyze the content of each scanned document and correct the orientation of the image on the fly. Even when scanning in duplex mode! Feed a document in all possible orientations, whether it’s upside down or reversed, skewed or rotated 90 degrees right or left, VRS turns it right.
Easy to Use
Scanning is simple and easy with VRS. No special knowledge of scanning, special filters, or image enhancement is required. Operators just press the scan button and VRS does the rest.
Capture Color On Demand
Scan mixed batches of black & white and color documents. VRS automatically detects the documents that should be black & white from those that should stay in color. Easily capture spot color as well.
Network-friendly Images
Noisy backgrounds and shaded areas are suppressed, resulting in ultra-compact image files ideal for display and rapid retrieval over your network.
Intelligent Blank Page Detection
VRS is able to determine if the back side of a page contains real information, or if it is simply bleed through from the front of the page. If VRS determines that the back side is bleed through, then it deletes the image. If VRS detects real content, the image is saved.

Advanced Clarity
Even the toughest documents – blueprints, wrinkled paper, security paper – are no match for VRS 4.1 Professional. The new Advanced Clarity feature in VRS 4.1 Professional offers an additional image quality option to process documents with complicated, textured backgrounds.
Background Smoothing
Based on a simple setting, VRS automatically analyzes images while scanning and outputs an image with a solidified background color. This improves viewing clarity and reduces file size, making it more practical to save color documents that are part of the business process.
Improved Recognition
Since VRS automatically straightens and cleans each scanned image, the accuracy of your optical character recognition and handwriting recognition software increases dramatically.
Scan at Rated Speed
Allows scanners to operate at their full rated speed without interruptions. All VRS features work at rated scanner speed, regardless of scan mode (black & white, grayscale, or color), or your scan application’s interface (KOFAX, ISIS,TWAIN).
Easy to Use Interface
One of the problems with document scanning is related to the differences between scanner user interfaces. In a mixed scanner environment, VRS provides a single, unified and easy to use interface minimizing operator training and confusion.
Automatic Cropping and Deskew for All Scanners
VRS offers automatic cropping and deskew for all scanners including white background scanners. In the past, this required a black background scanner or special black background kit. Now, VRS includes automatic background cropping and deskew available on all VRS certified scanners.
Eliminate Hole Punch Markings
Fills holes with surrounding page color on documents with content, improving their appearance and removing distractions for the reader. Ignores holes on pages lacking content, enhancing performance of automatic blank page deletion feature.

Convert PDF to TIFF - Using Ghost Script

Requirement : To convert any PDF to TIFF.
Solution: In an enterprise during the day to day activities, back operations and other teams come across requirements to convert a file from one format to another. Converting TIFF to PDF and vice versa is one of the example.

TIFF to PDF
If you are a non technical staff you may contact the software provider team in your organization and get access to the tool which does TIFF to PDF conversion. But if you are a technical person (programmer) then you can leverage iText library and write an application to achieve this. As iText is free so its easy to save yourself from licensing costs and other licensing related obligations.

PDF to TIFF
There are various scenarios where you might need to convert file from PDF to TIFF format. For example you may get some document from lender or broker in PDF format containing some sensitive information. Suppose as a part  of your process requirement you need to save only TIFF files containing no sensitive information so you have to go through two step process:

1). Convert PDF to TIFF

2). Remove the sensitive information

Here we are going to discuss the tool 'GhostScript' which helps in achieving first step. Installation of GhostScript :

Step 1: Download GhostScript by visiting the below link

http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs863/gs863w32.exe

Step 2: You can install this anywhere on your computer. For tutorial purpose I am using C:\Program Files\gs

The main file we are interested in is gswin32c which can be found in C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.63\bin folder. You can use this executable to perform the conversion either by running it at command prompt or inserting the following command in a batch (.bat) file and then executing it.

command 1 : cd C:\PROGRA~1\gs\gs8.63\bin
command 2: gswin32c -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -r300x300 -sOutputFile=%2 %1
Here is the explanation each switch/option we have used in the above example :

sDEVICE = Type of Tiff
-r300x300 = DPI settings

-dNOPAUSE 

Disables the prompt and pause at the end of each page. Normally one should use this (along with -dBATCH) when producing output on a printer or to a file; it also may be desirable for applications where another program is "driving" Ghostscript.  

-dBATCH

Causes Ghostscript to exit after processing all files named on the command line, rather than going into an interactive loop reading PostScript commands. Equivalent to putting -c quit at the end of the command line.

For more information visit http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Use.htm#Output_device http://www.ghostscript.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript