Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Omnipage Pro 11
Get more from your scanner with Scansoft Omnipage Pro 11, and maybe win one of two copies we've got to give away. Review by Kai Chandler
| Product | Omnipage Pro 11 |
|---|---|
| Company | Scansoft |
| Web | www.scansoft.com |
| Price | £434.74 (inc. VAT) An upgrade version is available for previous owners of ScanSoft OCR products for £99.99 inclusive of VAT. |
| We like | |
| We don't like | |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
If you have a scanner, then it probably came bundled with some software to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR.) This recognizes text in a scanned image and converts it into a revisable form that can be edited in a word processor, emailed to a colleague or otherwise modified. The bundled software is usually labelled Lite, LE or Classic and is indeed, light in form and function.
If you are serious about OCR then an upgrade to a more competent package is a must.
With its recent acquisition of Caere, Scansoft now offers the two leading OCR packages: Textbridge and Omnipage Pro.
Just launched is Omnipage Pro 11. Already an excellent product, how have they improved it and is it worth upgrading?
Headlining the changes is recognition of industry standard Acrobat .pdf files. You can now convert a .pdf file back to an editable document which adds to Onnipage's versatility. You can also scan a document and create a multipage .pdf without needing the expensive Adobe Acrobat tool. This will be of interest to web publishers who may wish to create downloadable electronic brochures for the web.
Also new in version 11 is HTML output. You can scan a document or input file, use the OCR to recognize the content and generate HTML files for uploading to a web page. Combined with the ability to read .pdf files, this means you can now generate HTML from .pdf!
Another new feature is Voice Read-Back. Select from over 30 voices including UK English male and female and hear the text read back. This feature may be of interest to the partially sighted as it gives them the opportunity to scan printed materials and have the text read out aloud without requiring multiple software packages.
In common with earlier versions, Omnipage Pro 11 is very easy to use. The manual OCR option breaks the process into three steps:
AutoOCR get page in black and white or colour. Alternatively, load file from disk.v
ManualOCR perform OCR
OCRWizard export results to file, mail or clipboard.
Even simpler, the AutoOCR button lets you run all three functions in sequence, stopping only to prompt for spelling corrections and file name to save the results into.
Omnipage is good at preserving the format of a scanned document, whether it be a table or newspaper article. For example, after scanning a complex multi-column magazine article, Omnipage was able to generate a near identical .pdf version complete with preserved images, headlines and column format. Recent advances such as a despeckle option to clean up degraded documents and improvements in the OCR engine have improved its recognition accuracy still further. Intellitrain and User Dictionaries allow you to train Omnipage to recognise non-standard typefaces and personalise dictionaries to your specialist requirements.
New Functions
Not only can you run Omnipage on a standalone basis, but when installed, it adds new functions to the toolbars in Microsoft Office 97, 2000 and XP. These are "Acquire Text" and "Acquire Text Settings" which allow you to scan text directly into Office.
Verdict
To sum up, Omnipage Pro 11 is the Swiss army knife of the scanner world. It boasts a wealth of functions including text-to-speech and the ability to recognize the content of Adobe Acrobat .pdf files. It can generate files in any of dozens of file formats including Acrobat and HTML. The good news is that these functions are built around one of the best OCR engines on the market. Owners of earlier Scansoft products can upgrade for fairly reasonable £99.99 (inc. VAT) but if you don't have a package to upgrade from it's a whacking £434.74 (inc. VAT).
