Actually, this issue of Tech Review includes an article on this very topic -- Wireless input and output devices -- and makes the same point: that a decent user interface is just as important (or maybe almost as important) as having the raw bandwidth. This article describes some really neat output devices (for example, little eyeglass-mounted deals that project a Big Screen view onto your retina). However, it says that the technology for mobile INPUT is not as far advanced, describing folding keyboards of various types and various voice recognition devices and schemes.
The Adobe literature makes it sound as if you need to license a $6,000 package with per-copy charges in order to do this. However, I've found (to my surprise), that the ordinary $400 package allows you to do quite a bit of the "paperless office" thing. You can "import" from paper to PDF -- in fact it integrates with the scanner driver. Moreover, the package has an incredibly accurate OCR capability built in. We have scanned (but not OCR'ed) quite a few documents with this package, and put them on an intranet. I haven't (yet) hit any particular limits. In addition, there is a complete 500 page spec. available with the PDF file layout, if you feel like writing your own stuff. I found a Perl module on CPAN that could extract some simple information from a PDF, and in conjunction with that, put together a search engine that allows you to index and search on "keywords" etc. manually coded into the file. It works for me. Writing a full text search program (for OCR'd or "distilled" documents) shouldn't be too hard. As soon as I find some code to deal with the internal text compression, I may do it.
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Actually, this issue of Tech Review includes an article on this very topic -- Wireless input and output devices -- and makes the same point: that a decent user interface is just as important (or maybe almost as important) as having the raw bandwidth. This article describes some really neat output devices (for example, little eyeglass-mounted deals that project a Big Screen view onto your retina). However, it says that the technology for mobile INPUT is not as far advanced, describing folding keyboards of various types and various voice recognition devices and schemes.
The Adobe literature makes it sound as if you need to license a $6,000 package with per-copy charges in order to do this. However, I've found (to my surprise), that the ordinary $400 package allows you to do quite a bit of the "paperless office" thing. You can "import" from paper to PDF -- in fact it integrates with the scanner driver. Moreover, the package has an incredibly accurate OCR capability built in. We have scanned (but not OCR'ed) quite a few documents with this package, and put them on an intranet. I haven't (yet) hit any particular limits. In addition, there is a complete 500 page spec. available with the PDF file layout, if you feel like writing your own stuff. I found a Perl module on CPAN that could extract some simple information from a PDF, and in conjunction with that, put together a search engine that allows you to index and search on "keywords" etc. manually coded into the file. It works for me. Writing a full text search program (for OCR'd or "distilled" documents) shouldn't be too hard. As soon as I find some code to deal with the internal text compression, I may do it.