Customer Reviews

OmniPage Pro 11.0

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This is a must-have program is you scan documents or receive faxes on your PC. It takes optical scanning recognition (OCR) to a level I never thought possible, and is a quantum leap from the OCR software that comes bundled with most scanners. ScanSoft, the manufacturer, claims a 40% improvement and from my experience I will not dispute this.

What I love, though is the fact that it handles columns and tables by doing a near-perfect conversion. It will also save your scanned files as HTML, which is a real plus if you have a web site and want to quickly add pages without creating them from scratch.

Adding to the power is the ability to import Adobe PDF files and convert them into Word documents, as well as to export your scanned documents as PDF files. This feature is convenient, but does not fully replace Adobe Acrobat 5.0, which does a lot more (see the Amazon product page for a fuller description of this software).

Other strengths is the "despeckle" module that will read scanned documents that have smears and other imperfections that will confuse other OCR programs.

I am using this software on a Windows 98 Second Edition system with a Canon CanoScan N650U USB scanner (the scanner is available from Amazon), and have been nothing but pleased with it. If you handle documents, especially faxes or paper, this will be one of your most essential tools.

I am something of an OCR fanatic because I depend a lot on being able to digitize research material for compact storage and easy access. I began some years ago with TextBridge and looked forward to seeing what Scansoft had done in melding the features of TextBridge and OmniPage. The result was a big disappointment. The ability to make PDFs in one step is a major improvement but they "lost" one the features that I find most important -- automatic separation of a scan of two pages at once from a book into separate scan pages. And the recognition accuracy and flexibility doesn't even come close to the standards set by ABBYY FineReader 5.0 (or even the earlier versions of FR!).

The one significant advantage of OP over FR is its ability to accept PDF files directly as inputs. Unless that is of overwhelming importance to you and your needs for recognition of complex material are modest, I would definitely skip OmniPage and get FineReader instead -- and save a bundle of money in the process.