SimpleView

Description

What SimpleView licenses

The full version, with annotations, OCR, image clean-up and batch conversion, is included with a SimpleIndex Professional workstation license at no extra cost, with no separate serial number. The free version stays free and available on its own whichever SimpleIndex edition you run. This only changes how the full version is licensed for Professional workstation customers.

Workstation licenses only. A concurrent, or floating, SimpleIndex license does not carry the suite applications, because the number of seats a floating license entitles can only be handed out by the license server.

Document management without a document management system

Most document management systems keep their own database. That means importing your files into the system first, and then going through the system every time you want one of them back. SimpleView works the other way round: it reads the folders you already have, on your hard drive or your file server, and lets you find, view and annotate what is in them.

The practical consequences are worth spelling out:

• No server to install or maintain, just a desktop application
• No proprietary layer between you and your own files
• Active Directory file permissions already apply, and can be edited from inside SimpleView
• Other applications can still reach the files
• Nothing has to be imported or tagged first
• Your existing backups already cover it
• Anyone who opens a document once a month can carry on using Windows Explorer

Why not just use Windows Explorer

Plenty of companies do, and for occasional use that is the right answer. SimpleView is for people who work with scanned documents all day:

• Scan straight into it over TWAIN
• Read multi-page documents without opening Acrobat or a separate viewer
• Rotate, clean up, reorder, split and merge multi-page TIFF and PDF files
• Convert documents to text or to searchable PDF with OCR
• Annotate, with notes, highlights and mark-ups that leave the original untouched
• Highlight or redact search hits automatically
• Search by pattern, with regular expressions, across filenames and inside PDF text
• Search large file shares in seconds rather than minutes
• Dock, undock and rearrange the panes, including across multiple monitors, with the layout remembered

Regular expression file search, finding filenames containing any date

New in v12

Large scanned PDFs open considerably faster and more reliably. The viewer now handles WebP, EML and HTML files. Clicking into a scanned page that has already been recognized lets you select its text, which previously only worked on pages that were generated rather than scanned. SimpleView also installs per user without administrator rights now, matching the rest of the suite.

Quality control on a scanning line

SimpleView started as a quality control and rescan tool and is still good at it:

• Page properties, resolution, color depth and compression, visible in the toolbar
• Select files or pages automatically by those properties, then convert them in a batch
• Select every even page, every odd page, or every blank page in one action
• Drag and drop pages, files and folders
• Split, merge and reorder faster than the previous generation of the tool
• Processing runs on background threads, so you keep working while a batch converts
• Deskew, despeckle, rotate, crop and rescan, all still present

Selecting by page property is the fast way to standardize a mixed batch

Free version and full version

SimpleView is free if you only need to scan, search and view. Annotations, image clean-up, batch conversion and OCR require the full version. It runs in full trial mode for 30 days with everything enabled, then continues in free mode until it is activated, so nothing stops working when the trial ends.

Features	Free	Full
Integrated Windows explorer style image browser
View thumbnails of files
View page thumbnails for selected file
Dockable view windows with multiple monitor support
Supports TIFF, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP format
TWAIN scanning to TIFF or PDF
Rescan pages
Rotate pages
Rearrange pages in multi-page files
Extract pages to new file
Append pages to files
Delete pages and files
Email files or extracted pages
Print files or pages
Integrated Windows file security
Fast folder and file searching
Support for Regular Expressions in file and text searches
Search text in PDF files
Deskew (correct image angle)
Despeckle (remove noise)
Remove black borders
Crop images
Detect blank pages
Split large files
Merge multiple TIFF and PDF files into one
Convert files between image formats
OCR to Text or searchable PDF Image+Text (Tesseract)
Resample image resolution
Convert between Black & White and Color formats
Select files/pages based on images properties (Color, DPI)
Annotate TIFF and PDF files
Select files/pages based on annotations
Automatically highlight or redact full text search results with annotations

What SimpleView does not do

• It is not a document management system. There is no check-in and check-out, no retention policy, no version history and no approval routing. It is a better way to work with the folders you already have.
• It does not index documents for you. Reading values off a page and filing by them is what SimpleIndex does. SimpleView reads and edits what is already filed.
• Search speed depends on the share. A slow or heavily loaded file server is still a slow file server.
• It is Windows only. There is no macOS or Linux build.

Support and updates

The full version’s price includes its first year of support and updates. After that it renews at $40 a year. Every support call reaches our own team in Knoxville.

Try the free version first

Scanning, searching and viewing are all in the free version, so point it at a folder of your own documents before buying anything. Download SimpleView.