OmniPage Pro 12 Office

OmniPage Pro 12 Office

OmniPage Pro has always been a good optical character recognition (OCR) package, steadily improving from the old days when success meant reading more than 85 percent of a page. It has been so good that I have often skipped one or two upgrades, being satisfied with what I had and waiting until the next release to see if there is something significant being offered — OmniPage Pro 12 Office does.

Installation and first use were a snap. Being the sort of techno-wonk who eschews manuals, I simply loaded the CD and installed it on my computer. It was not only smart enough to find my scanner (a Visioneer 9650 USB), but it also tested its various capabilities and offered the option of using OmniPage’s own scanner interface directly within OmniPage. Boldly, I chose their interface. (What did I know? I had not read the manual.)

Moments later, I was presented with a screen that had some drop-down menus, two large windows on either side, and some buttons along the top.

One of the buttons read “1-2-3,” which seemed an appropriate level for me to begin. When I hovered over the button, a pop-up message read, “Start/stop automatic processing.”

I popped in a page containing multiple fonts, graphics and centered text as well as a moderately complex layout. Might as well see if I can confuse this honker, right?

It found my automatic document feeder, fed in the document to the scanner, and moments later the left window showed the scanned document and the right window showed how it had interpreted it. Better still, when OmniPage was not certain about a word (not being in its spell checker), it highlighted the word in the interpreted document, and popped up a window over the scanned image showing a magnified version of the questionable word as scanned and offering some choices of possible correct interpretations.

Of course, you can add your own words to the dictionary. It claims to have both a medical and legal dictionary included. All I can say is it had no problem with both “usufruct” and “Oderint dum metuant.”

I found my first scan to be flawless in its interpretation, finding the graphics (and importing them to the right place in my Microsoft Word document output) and formatting the page with essentially the same fonts, sizes and layouts as in the original. It missed a couple of horizontal spacing lines, but caught all the various sized fonts and italics.

OmniPage Pro 12 does what it’s supposed to do, but it also does more. I input a Portable Document Format (PDF) file by dragging the PDF file to the input side of the screen. The source file had drawings, color pictures, complex layout, and it was more than 100 pages long. It took about 2.5 seconds per page to read it in, and about 4 seconds per page to interpret. The program was challenged by the drawings, which had text fly-outs that confused it. However, in a short time, I had an editable PDF document.

I was able to output a scanned document in searchable PDF format. I could output in Extensible Markup Language, various PDF formats, spreadsheet and a host of word processing and publishing formats. (For you troglodytes, Wordstar was not one of them.) Although it claims to be able to interpret text in more than 114 languages, I was only able to test it in English. I don’t speak Greek, and all the rest of those languages are Greek to me.

There is an odd feature that is fun to play with, but I am not certain it has practical use in a law office — the text-to-speech function that allows you to have the computer read back what it has interpreted. You can choose any of a couple dozen voices, only one of which sounded human to me, and it does a creditable job of reading.

I am not sure what it’s for, unless you like to do your proofreading audibly. It was annoying that I could only have it read a single word, line or page at a time. Still, OmniPage Pro 12 is the best OCR package available.

ScanSoft Inc.
(978) 977-2000
www.scansoft.com

Price: $599.99 for single unit
Windows 98SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP

Reviewed by Daniel S. Coolidge, the ABA Law Practice Management chairman of divisions. He is also co-author of “A Survival Guide for Road Warriors: Essentials for Mobile Attorneys.”

Feb/Mar '03 Issue

PROS
The program is easy to use and full featured.

CONS
The company raised the price. Look for better street pricing and deals.

VERDICT
I recommend it. It’s the best OCR package I have seen for the price.