Bruce Von Stiers
About a year ago I wrote a review on a program from ScanSoft called OmniPage Pro 11. This program dealt with OCR or Optical Character Recognition. At that time, ScanSoft had added a bunch of new features to the program that made it far better than it had been. Now ScanSoft has released OmniPage Pro 12 Office. There are eight new features in version 12 that help improved usage of the program to make it a very versatile OCR package.
In testing version 11, I scanned four documents. I did the same on the test for version 12. I used a handwritten note from my desk, a press release this program, a newspaper page and a magazine page with text and graphics on it.
What exactly does an OCR program do? It takes a scanned document and interprets it so that the document can be used on your computer. As I mentioned in the review for version 11, the two top reasons for people to need an OCR software program is the ability to save a scanned document in an acceptable format and have the program be able to interpret a hand written page. If you’re handwriting is as bad as mine is, then being able to interpret a hand scripted page is definitely needed. And as I did in the testing of version 11, the program was checked out to see how well it fared in these two areas.
First of all, let me tell you about my scanner. It is a Visioneer 6100. I got it as part of a package deal almost three years ago. It does just fine for me so I have seen no need to upgrade to a bigger, badder scanner. I used this scanner to scan the four documents used in the test.
The OmniPage Desktop has several different areas. The program makes it real easy to navigate the Desktop. There is a three step process in working with your document that can be done through the OmniPage Toolbox. Click on one of the steps listed in the Toolbox and away you go.
Other parts of the Desktop are the Standard Toolbox, the Image Panel, the Text Editor and the Document Manager. There is also a Menu Bar that handles all of the pull-down menus for the program.
Once you decide that a document needs to be scanned and recognized, it is a matter of simply taking the program through its paces. The easiest way to start is to use the OCR Wizard. It gives you a choice of processing a document that will be scanned or one that is an image file on your computer. For a scanned document, you are given a choice of black and white, grayscale or color.
After the document has been scanned, an OCR Proofreader box comes up. This is an incident by incident check by the program for suspect words. These are words, or characters within a word, that the program does not recognize. If it encounters a suspect word you are given the option of ignoring that instance of the word, ignore all instances of the word or add it to a dictionary. It will also offer alternative spellings of the suspected word, if they are available.
When the program is checking and recognizing the document there are several options to choose from. You can have the program automatically check the document. You can also check it as a document with no columns, with one or more columns, with or without tables or even in a spreadsheet.
After going through the scanning, checking and recognizing stages, it was now time to save the document. You can save it as a file, send it as an e-mail or copy it to the clipboard. There are 29 different document formats to same to. There are five PDF formats and you can save it as a Word document from versions 6 on up through XP. You can also save it as an Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint 97 or Publisher 98 file. WordPerfect users don’t have to worry. The program also will let you save to versions 5.1 through 10 of WordPerfect.
If you want to save the document as an image, there are fourteen file types to choose from. Aside from JPEG, GIF and BMP, there are six types of TIFF formats to save to.
The program will also allow you to import PDF files and export them into a different format. A whole bunch of earlier editions of BVS Reviews had been converted to PDF files to conserve space. When I used OmniPage to import and to save one of those files, it did so with little degradation of the original pages in the PDF document. As I mentioned above, you can also save your OmniPage document as a PDF file.
The four test documents were recognized with a fair amount of ease. The newsprint gave the program a run for its money though. I must have chosen the Ignore close to fifty times during checking of the newsprint scan. The magazine page had a graphic with a white background and text on it, so the program interpreted it a little strangely. I was able to do the recognition portion pretty quickly though. The press release for the program contained several suspect words which were entered into dictionary for the next time out. And the handwritten note took a while, as I knew it would. Remember my bad handwriting? The program didn’t think too highly of it and let me know.
In the closing for my review on version 11, I noted that the program might not have everything that there needs to be in an OCR package, but comes close. But with new features like a streamlined interface, improved PDF handling and better proofing and verifying tools, OmniPage Pro 12 Office is definitely coming closer to having everything in one nice package.
The list price for OmniPage Pro 12 Office is $ 599. The upgrade $ 199. You can buy it from a retailer or directly though ScanSoft. . Their web site is www.scansoft.com.