OmniPage is my personal secretary
Written: Feb 07 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Highly efficient OCR program, superb accuracy, variable output choices
Cons: Rather pricey, complicated to master
The Bottom Line: When you need to convert paper documents to editable electronic documents, nothing else does the job as well as OmniPage Pro!
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| bwestman's Full Review: Nuance OmniPage Pro 11.0 Full Version for PC (2809... |
When a really large typing job came across my desk, I decided it was time for the company to own a “real” Optical Character Recognition program. The scanner we have came with a basic bundle of software that included a lightweight OCR program, but that program was sadly inadequate for the task at hand.
After a little research (and a direct mail email that offered me a killer deal), I decided that OmniPage Pro version 11.0 was what we simply had to have! Being brave, and confident in my persuasive powers, I bought it, convinced that the boss would be proud of me and reimburse me for what I paid. I was right. OmniPage Pro performed so well on the projects I had on my desk that the boss okayed my expense report without any complaint.
Well, you ask, what is so fantastic about this program? Everything. Simply everything. To begin with, the character recognition is outstanding. The first piece I tried to “read” was a copy of a fax of a copy of a newspaper article. You can imagine just how great that was to try to read. And I was supposed to distribute it! Well, I couldn't see copying or faxing this degraded document again, so I put the OCR program to the test.
No, I’m not going to tell you that it was a perfect read. I did have to work with it some. I was surprised, though, at how much it was able to read correctly. All in all, I spent about 10 minutes working with the document…much less time that I would have spent had I decided to retype it. Once scanned, I was able to email it to everyone and they had a crisp clear article that they could read without any trouble.
This program boasts some pretty great features, such as:
Built-in PDF functionality, Input and Output
What does that mean? That means that you can now create your own documents and export them to PDF (Adobe Acrobat Reader) format. That really opens up a whole new world of portability for your documents. Now you can scan things (or import them) and convert them to a document that can be read by anyone with any computer configuration. It also means that when you download a PDF file, you can import it into OmniPage pro and save it, with all it’s formatting, into a Word document.
Built-in Text Editor
You don’t even have to export your scanned document into Word or Excel or whatever. You can make your changes right from within OmniPage and print out your formatted output. When using the built in text editor, I’ve found the greatest level of accuracy and format retention. It is a very simple, yet powerful text editor.
IntelliTrain Proofing
OmniPage Pro is now distributed by the same people who brought us Dragon Naturally Speaking. With Dragon, the program “learns” as you speak and becomes more accustomed to your voice. It makes fewer and fewer mistakes as you progress. That same type of technology has been applied now to OCR programming. OmniPage “learns” as it reads and determines context as well as individual characters in order to make correct choices when deciphering a word. Back to the degraded document I worked with…I rerecognized it and I did notice that many of the words it “got wrong” the first time through were correct the second time. There is also a built in User dictionary to add industry specific or personal words, abbreviations, etc. that are likely to be in the documents you read. Basically, the more you use it, the better it is. In just the short time I’ve been working with OmniPage Pro, I’ve seen an improvement in the accuracy rate (which was already pretty high to start with).
Voice Readback with Multiple language support
Now THIS is fun. After you scan and recognize a document, you can then have OmniPage read it back to you aloud so you can listen for errors. It is great if you have a really dry technical document that you need to proofread. You can have OmniPage read it while you follow along. It will supposedly read English and most European languages (claims to support over 100 languages!). English is really the only one I need (although I may try scanning some French and Spanish just for kicks). I haven’t tried the multi language portion, but I have had it read me back some of my documents and it is a great feature!
Color Recognition
While this is pretty much self-explanatory, older programs had difficulty recognizing color and none of them would retain it. OmniPage pro not only reads your color documents but it retains the color formatting in your saved files.
Format Retention
Now, when you read a document into the scanner, all the formatting is retained. This includes columns (like my newspaper article), tables, headers and footers, headlines, page numbers, captions, photos and graphics, etc., etc., etc. That’s the claim. And for the most part, it works well. I have found that sometimes the tables don’t import well into Word and I have to spend a bit of time cleaning up the column and row spacing. It’s still quicker than retyping, but I was a little disappointed with the performance of the table import feature.
Despeckle Module
This feature came heavily into play with the above mentioned article. What this does is remove all those odd and stray dots, marks, and other extraneous “things” that tend to end up on documents when they are copied or faxed. It does a great job! The program counts them as “graphics” and puts them in a “zone” of their own so that if it is something you meant to keep, you can or you can delete it. Only larger marks are treated this way. Those annoying little dust dots just go away.
Other features I haven’t worked with yet
Formatted HTML Output – Their claim: “With OmniPage Pro 11, what you see is what you get. Our new WYSIWYG HTML output maintains the formatting of documents when they're converted to web pages.” Sounds good, I’ll have to try it!
Direct OCR – Their claim: “Direct OCR allows you to move text directly into Microsoft Word and Excel without first going into OmniPage. With OmniPage Pro 11, the direct OCR feature now supports tables and graphics as if they were processed from within OmniPage.” I haven’t figured out how this works yet…but I will.
Schedule OCR – Their claim: “With a separate schedule OCR feature, scheduling an OCR job for another time is easier than ever before. Scheduled jobs can now be run even when OmniPage is not running.” Well ain’t that dandy? I can’t imagine when I might want to do this, but it’s there for ya!
System Requirements:
• Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, NT 4.0, or 2000
• Intel Pentium processor or equivalent
• 32 MB RAM (64 MB Recommended)
• Required hard disk space: 115-170 MB depending on operating system requirements
• CD-ROM drive
• SVGA monitor, minimum 800 x 600 (256 colors or higher)
• Scanner
Overall Summary
I am very proud of myself for buying this program. It is quite exciting and very powerful. I am very pleased with the results that I’ve gotten from the documents I’ve scanned and while I would have liked a little better results with forms and tables, I really can’t complain too much. It is a true time-saver for a company or individual that is heavily dependent on electronic communications (like ours is).
While it is a little expensive ($499!) for the full version, if you own any ScanSoft OCR software (which you probably do if you own a scanner), you qualify for the upgrade version with is only $149. Yes, it’s more expensive than many of it’s competitors, but nothing else compares to the power of OmniPage Pro v. 11.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
bwestman
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Location: Maine
Reviews written: 240
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About Me:
I am hopelessly impulsive. I admit it.
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