Customer Reviews

Omnipage Pro 14

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is not a planted review. I'm just a home user. I have been using OmniPage for years. The last version I used prior to OmniPage Pro 14 was OmniPage Pro 10.

This version does the worst job of layout retention I have seen in any OCR software period. Version 10, the version I was using prior to upgrading worked much better.

Its hard to use, menus and features appear easy but in fact don't work very well at all. The system of "workflows" is flawed at best.

If you just want to take a simple text document with images and scan it into say word be prepared for a nightmare once in word. The result of your scan will retain very little of the layout of your original document.

ScanSoft makes some very fine products that I use. Oddly their "flayship" software OmniPage is difficult to use and performs poorly. Do yourself a favor and look at other OCR software before buying this.

OmniPage 14 worked great at first. Then I needed a patch to fix some problems I'm having with the Batch Manager. Their update function under help is broken. (Look at other recent posts by other users.) I tried calling yesterday ($20) and couldn't get through.

I'm well versed in fixing broken apps. After uninstalling/reinstalling, uninstalling/manually removing files and registry entries/reinstalling, I'm still having the same problems that are making it totally unusable. After searching Scansoft's website, and posting twice to their "user forums", I started looking for alternative solutions. I found more posts here than I did on Scansoft's site.

Three things your readers might want to know: 1) There is no free online technical support ($10 per report sent is available) 2) You have one free call to tech support (then it is $20) 3) Updating the software is not through downloads from the website. The website lists that an SP1 is available for Omnipage Pro 14, but it can only be accessed through the help/webupdate feature in the program. Unfortunately the webudate doesn't work and though I have reported the bug twice, I got no communication from Sansoft and no information in their online "knowledge base" on how to solve this problem. Since I am in Europe, I haven't called their tech support, and in fact I am more than irritated that such a complicated method of software updates exists. When other software companies offer auto updates through the program (such as Microsoft Windows, Office, etc.) they also let you download directly when the auto method doesn't work or isn't convenient. I think your readers need to know the mindset of Sansoft before they buy a product that may be expensive and inconvenient to maintain.

The program worked OK on the laptop with the dedicated scanner. I tried to move it into the office and the thing would not let me save coverted documents. Yikes!!. I struggled for hours, reading manuals, going over settings etc. I downloaded service packs and had my IT person work on it for several hours. No luck. We tried everything. We changed operating systems. We changed word processors. We reinstalled and deinstalled. Support is useless. Even the support website is full of bugs. Try it yourself. If you can get into the community message board, you will see countless posts with complaints about this product. That's only if you can get in to see the posts. I tried a dozen times to read the posts and was bumped out to the main page, usually after being able to scan only one or two pages. Perhaps this program will work for you. Perhaps not. One thing is for sure, I fully believe the authenticity of the negative posts below. Don't take my word for it. Get the facts yourself. Just stop into the Scansoft website and read the community posts, if you can get in to see them.

Text recognition is very good on a simple, typewrited page but, hey, there are sharewares that do this for free. I tested Omnipage mainly on complex textbook pages with headers, 2 columns, figures with legends. I chose 240 dpi as a compromise between size and accuracy. The result:
1. When converting a 2-column page to PDF, the text flows ACROSS the columns instead of down then right. Useless for cut & paste. Also, word search is not sequential. Omnipage support never answered my questions on this issue (nor on any other).
2. Figures with small objects on a contrasting background (e.g. birds flying in the sky) are interpreted as text, with laughable result. In general, the recognition of image fields was bad.
5. Figure legends were systematically included with the text around them instead of being assigned to a separate text box.
4. This beast needs A LOT of CPU. I ran it on a 2.8GHz P4 and it was crawling through the pages.
5. Not an Omnipage issue, but as an aside: Omnipage offers to save the text as a MS Word file. Note that MS Word will not open a file larger than 32 Mb. I did not know this. Did you?
Final word: mediocre, too expensive. Try sharewares first.

It's bad enough that Omnipage Pro 14 Office crashes when you try to process a PDF file; bad enough that it crashes when you try to download an update from within the program (the only way ScanSoft allows you to do it)-- if there are solutions for these serious problems in their product, ScanSoft will not tell you about them unless you pay $9.95 per incident for e-mail support, $19.95 to actually speak to someone. What a lousy policy. What a crummy product!

Beware of this product. It is buggy - see eg the users group at http://webboard.scansoft.com/ - and there is no free support, even for program bugs. Scansoft's attitude to known bugs is illustrated by the fact that there is a bug in both versions 11 and 12 which prevents many users from updating the program but despite a large number of postings to this effect on Scansoft's own website already referred to and e-mail notification to ScanSoft the bug remains. Abby FineReader apparently offers free support and a scanner that users say is better, for example, for OCR scanning.

This is a good product but forget about getting any available service packs from Scansoft and they won't help you. They also bury postings in the online help community if they are negative. The online knowledge help system is a joke. The company seems to be 'dead' to helping customers. I can see why Microtek scanner company dumped Scansoft to favor Abbey Fine Reader for bundled software. Wish I would have gone with Abbey instead. An important item with version 14 is the PDF tool. It is completely useless. You cannot get control of any fonts and the unicode or multinational font driver is 16 bit and won't do most of the characters. Trying any advertised acrobatics with a PDF is hopeless and security? none. Someone at Scansoft referred me to Digital River where it was bought via Scansoft online store to get help and Digital River simply ignores your request, and not only that their system retains email address use to buy it even if it changed and you cannot update it. They 'say' their response will go to dead email address. Looks like money rules to hell with the users. (This review is about the flagship OmniPage Pro 14 Office.) Addendum: Several months after this post XP Pro had to be reloaded on a clean drive, and the Scansoft service pack downloaded without a hitch provided some Scansoft knowlege base tips are followed.

I want to add some more specifics to my review below. I bought Omnipage 12. It would not instal. Only after extensive searching on the internet did I find that it was incompatible - believe it or not - with the Windows XP start menu and also with all desktop backgrounds except the XP logo!

The problem could apparently be resolved by downloading service packs 1 & 2. So I changed to the new start menu and XP logo background and installation then was possible. But when I tried to get service packs 1 & 2, which can only be accessed by using the upgrade function within the program, nothing happened. An e-mail request to ScanSoft for help was ignored. No help was available on the users group either as no-one had found a solution.

But I persevered and tried to use Omnipage without the service packs. Then came the next unpleasant shock. I have an HP OfficeJet d135 four-in-one. Although listed by ScanSoft as a compatible scanner I found that this is only partly true. The shocking part was that Omnipage was not compatible - believe it or not again - with the automatic document handler on HP scanners! So I must feed in each page separately while it slowly scans them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Omnipage users group is moribund or dead. I don't know if ScanSoft is blocking postings to the website because there were so many that were less than complimentary or whether users just gave up because there were no solutions.

Abbyy FineReader offers as complete a contrast as can be imagined. Free, unlimited technical assistance and a lively users group populated by a clearly contented group of users.

So decide for yourself.

PS: I suppose I invited Whukadogs' assupmtion that my review is a negative plant. For the record, I am an attorney practising in Johannesburg South Africa with no connection whatever to Abbyy. I too value reviews by IT publications but I wish that the reviewers would go to the user groups on the product to get the lowdown on it. One gets the impression that they all too often just read one another's reviews, with the result that they fortify one another in their misperceptions. We've all seen committees doing that.

I bought this software in Jan '04 and I've had occasion to use it infrequently, fortunately for me. As noted in other reviews, it can recognize simple text such as in a book page w/o photos or tables. But add any boxes, tables or graphs and it stumbles badly and does a Bill Gates, simply locks up.

You can't even ask a question w/o registering the product and that in itself is a task. Pack a lunch because you'll be there a while. They ask early on for a serial number and even tho it had been more than two years I had the original packaging. Feeling rather smug I opend the package and "mirebile dictu" NOTHING called a serial number, plenty of alphnumerics tho. After several tries, I found that serial number is code for "description". Then I moved on to pages of intrusive qustions up to but not including masturbatory fantasies, thank you. Then they had the temerity to try to sell me stuff.

There may be a good, simple, intuitive scanning program out there, but this ain't it. There may be a customer responsive company out there but Scansoft (now Nuance, how cute) ain't it. Keep looking and good luck, Jack Shale